Daniel Anderson became the world's most notorious laboratory a few weeks before the first known cases of Covid-19 were reported in central China. Even so, the Australian virologist still wonders what he missed.
An expert on bat-borne viruses, Anderson is the only foreign scientist to have conducted research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology's BSL-4 lab, which is equipped to handle the planet's deadliest pathogens, in mainland China. His most recent tenure ended in November 2019, giving Anderson an insider's look at a place that has become a flashpoint in his search for the cause of the worst pandemic in a century.
The emergence of the coronavirus in the same city where scientists from the institute, clad in protective gear from head to toe, study the exact family of the virus has led to speculation that it may have leaked from the laboratory via an infected worker or contaminated object. could.
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The lack of transparency in China since the early days of the outbreak fueled doubts that the U.S. Which has turned the quest to uncover the origins of the virus, a key to preventing future pandemics, into a geopolitical mine.
The lab's work and the director of its Emerging Infectious Diseases section—Shi Zhengli, a longtime collaborator on Anderson's "Batwoman" task for hunting viruses in caves—have now been embroiled in controversy.
The US has questioned the safety of the lab, alleging that its scientists were engaged in the controversial gain of function research that manipulated viruses in a way that could make them more dangerous.
This is in contrast to the location Anderson described in an interview with Bloomberg News, in which he shared details about the first time he worked in the lab.
He said half-truths and distorted information obscured accurate accounting of the lab's functions and activities, which was more routine than the way they are portrayed in the media.
"Not that it was boring, but it was a routine lab that worked just like any other high-containment lab," Anderson said. "That's not what people are saying."
Now at Melbourne's Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Anderson began collaborating with Wuhan researchers in 2016, when she was scientific director of the Biosafety Lab at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. Their research—which focuses on why deadly viruses such as Ebola and Nipah do not cause disease in bats, which they study—complementary studies at the Chinese Institute, which funded to encourage international cooperation. offered.
A rising star in the virology community, Anderson, 42, says his work on Ebola in Wuhan was the achievement of a career goal of a lifetime.
Her favorite film is "Outbreak," a 1995 film in which pathologists respond to a dangerous new virus—a job Anderson said she wanted to do. For him, this meant working on Ebola in a highly controlled laboratory.
Anderson's career has taken him all over the world. After earning a bachelor's degree from Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, he worked as a lab technician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, then went on to complete his Ph.D.
Under the supervision of noted virologists John Mackenzie and Linfa Wang in Australia. Came back He did post-doctoral work in Montreal before moving to Singapore and working again with Wang, who described Anderson as "very committed and dedicated" and similar in personality to Xi.
"They are both very blunt with such high ethical standards," Wang said by phone from Singapore, where he is director of the Emerging Infectious Diseases Program at Duke-NUS Medical School. "I'm very proud of what Danielle has done."
On The Ground
Anderson was on the ground in Wuhan when experts believe the virus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, began to spread. Daily visits for a period in late 2019 brought him closer to many others working at the 65-year-old research center. She was part of a group that gathered every morning at the Chinese Academy of Sciences to catch a bus that would take them to the institute about 20 miles away.
As the only alien, Anderson stood out, and he said other researchers there looked for him.
"We went to dinner together, had lunch, we saw each other outside the lab," she said.
From his first visit, before it formally opened in 2018, Anderson was impressed with the institute's Maximum Biocontainment Lab.
The concrete, the bunker-style building has the highest biosafety designation and requires air, water, and waste to be filtered and sterilized before leaving the facility. There were strict protocols and requirements aimed at containing the pathogens being studied, Anderson said, and the researchers took 45 hours of training to become certified to work independently in the laboratory.
The induction process required scientists to demonstrate their knowledge of control procedures and their ability to wear air-pressure suits. "It's very, very broad," Anderson said.
He said entering and exiting the facility was a carefully choreographed effort. Departures were particularly complicated by the need for both chemical baths and personal baths—the timing of which was precisely planned.
Special Disinfectant
These regulations are mandatory in BSL-IV laboratories, although Anderson noted differences in comparisons of similar facilities in Europe, Singapore, and Australia in which he has worked.
The Wuhan lab uses a bespoke method to manufacture and monitor its disinfectants daily, a system Anderson was inspired to introduce to his lab. She was connected via a headset to colleagues in the lab's command center to enable continuous communication and security alerting—steps designed to ensure nothing goes awry.
Although the Trump administration's focus in 2020 was on the idea that the virus escaped from the Wuhan facility, something went seriously wrong at the institute, which houses some 20 biological and biomedical research institutes of virology, viral pathology, and virus technology are experts. of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Virologists and infectious disease experts initially rejected this theory, noting that viruses jump regularly from animals to humans. There was no clear evidence from within the genome of SARS-CoV-2 that it had been artificially manipulated, or that the laboratory harbored progenitor strains of the pandemic virus.
Political observers suggested that the allegations had a strategic basis and were designed to put pressure on Beijing.
And yet, China's actions raised questions. The government refused to allow international scientists to visit Wuhan in early 2020, when the outbreak was raging, in which the U.S. Also involved were experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who were already in the field.
Beijing balked at allowing World Health Organization experts into Wuhan for more than a year, and then provided only limited access. The WHO team's final report, written and checked with Chinese researchers, downplayed the possibility of lab leaks. Instead, it said the virus was probably transmitted via bats to another animal and gave some credence to a favorite Chinese theory that it could have been transferred via frozen food.
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Never Sick
China's objection prompted outside researchers to reconsider their stance. Last month, 18 scientists writing in the journal Science called for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19, which would take a balanced look at the possibility of a laboratory accident.
Even the Director-General of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the laboratory theory has not been widely studied.
But it is US President Joe Biden's take on the idea—which was previously dismissed by many as a Trumpist conspiracy theory—that has given it new legitimacy.
Biden last month called on US intelligence agencies to restart their efforts to root out the origins of COVID-19, following an earlier report revealed by the Wall Street Journal, which claimed three of the lab's researchers were admitted to the hospital in November 2019 with flu-like symptoms.
Anderson said he had no idea anyone at the Wuhan institute was sick until late 2019. In addition, there is a process for reporting symptoms that is consistent with pathogens controlled in high-risk containment laboratories.
"If people were sick, I think I would be sick—and I wouldn't be," she said. "I was tested for coronavirus in Singapore before being vaccinated, and it never happened."
Not only this, many of Anderson's colleagues in Wuhan had come to Singapore in late December for a meeting on the Nipah virus. He said that there was no sign of any disease outbreak in the laboratory.
"There was no bullshit," Anderson said. "Scientists are gossipy and excited. From my point of view, there was nothing strange at the time that you would think that something is happening here."
The names of the scientists who are reported to be hospitalized have not been disclosed. The Chinese government and the lab's now-renowned bat-virus researcher Shi Zhengli have repeatedly denied that anyone at the facility has contracted Covid-19. Anderson's work at the facility, and her funding, ended after the pandemic emerged and she focused on the novel coronavirus.
It is not that it is impossible that the virus spread from there. Anderson, better than most people, understands how a pathogen can escape a laboratory. SARS, an earlier coronavirus that emerged in Asia in 2002 and has killed more than 700 people, has since passed out of safe facilities a few times, she said.
If presented with evidence that such an accident led to COVID-19, Anderson "could have foreseen how things might have turned out," she said. "I'm not naive enough to say that I totally write it down."
And yet, she still believes that it most likely came from a natural source. Since it took researchers nearly a decade to figure out where the SARS pathogen came from in nature, Anderson says he's not surprised he hasn't found a "smoking gun" bat responsible for the latest outbreak yet.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is so big that Anderson said he didn't know what everyone was working on in late 2019. He is aware of published research from the lab that involved testing viral components for their propensity to infect human cells. Anderson is convinced that no virus was intentionally created and released intentionally to infect people—one of the more troubling theories about the origins of the pandemic.
Gain of function
Anderson acknowledged that it would be theoretically possible for a scientist in the laboratory to inadvertently infect himself and then inadvertently infect others in the community working at the benefit of the work technique. But there is no evidence that happened, and Anderson described the likelihood as extremely slim.
Gaining authorization to create viruses in this way typically requires several layers of approval, and there are scientific best practices that place strict limits on such work.
For example, there was a moratorium on research that could be done on the Spanish flu virus of 1918 after scientists isolated it decades later.
Even if such an advantage of the ceremony is approved, it is difficult to achieve, Anderson said. The technique is called reverse genetics.
"It's really hard to make it work when you want to make it work," she said.
Anderson's laboratory in Singapore was the first laboratory outside China to isolate SARS-CoV-2 from a COVID patient and then grow the virus. This was complex and challenging, even for a team that worked with coronaviruses that knew its biological characteristics, including the protein receptor. He said that in these key aspects no one will be able to try to prepare a new virus. Still, the Materials the researchers' study—the basic building blocks and genetic fingerprints of viruses—are not initially infectious, so they would require a significant amount of culture to infect people.
Despite this, Anderson feels that an investigation is needed to trace the origin of the virus once and for all. He is shocked by the depiction of the laboratory and the toxic attacks on scientists by some media outside China.
One of a dozen experts appointed to an international task force in November to study the origins of the virus, Anderson has not attracted public attention, especially after being targeted by US extremists in early 2020, when he posted online Revealed wrong information about the pandemic.
Subsequent vitriol prompted him to file a police report. Over the past 18 months, many coronavirus scientists have experienced threats of violence that have made them hesitant to speak out because of the risk that their words will be misinterpreted.
Elements known to trigger infectious outbreaks—a mixture of humans and animals, especially wildlife—were present in Wuhan, creating a favorable environment for the spread of a new zoonotic disease. In that regard, the emergence of COVID-19 follows a familiar pattern. What is shocking to Anderson is the way in which this global infection has spread.
"The pandemic is something that no one could have imagined on this scale," she said. Researchers must study the catastrophic path of COVID to determine what went wrong and how to prevent the spread of pathogens with pandemic potential in the future.
"The virus was in the right place at the right time and everything was ready to cause this disaster."
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