On finding answers

Finding an answer to the origin of covid-19 will help the world assimilate what has happened.

“I believe there's a moral imperative to try and answer that question.”

Sometimes words resonate so deeply that they stick with you, long after they are seen on the page, or spoken. Sometimes those words are your own. And still, they hit you in the face. Today I’m watching my words—about the moral imperative to find an answer on the origins of covid—being quoted and requoted back at me on Twitter. I said them when chatting in a podcast, and I meant them. But today, I’m struck by my sudden depth of feeling about this issue. As a matter of principle, we have to try and find out what happened in Hubei, China in 2019 to trigger the pandemic. It is important. For those that died, and for the people who remain.

Some of this newfound feeling came from a visit to the covid memorial wall in London. I went to add a heart to the wall for my beloved aunt, who I lost in March 2020. The National Covid Memorial Wall in central London is an unauthorised “mural”. It is graffiti. The pink heart I helped to paint is illegal. But there are 130,000 other hearts already there, on a wall that stretches for a third of a mile along the South Bank of the Thames river. Volunteers¹ wanted to commemorate those lost to the pandemic in the United Kingdom. There is supposed to be one heart for each of the dead. It is right in front of St Thomas’s Hospital, where my aunt died.

After we finished the memorial, I wanted to take a walk along the South Bank to remember the dead. I walked a few paces and turned to look at some of the inscriptions. To fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers, aunts... it was instantly overwhelming. Turning to look down the wall, the individual sadness multiplied, again, and again, and again, in what became a lawn of pink to the eye. Suddenly, numbers have meaning in the form of a staggering impression of loss and grief. And impossible to fully absorb.

Zoom out again, this time to the world. Imagine the 4m dead so far. And then there are the people who didn’t get counted. One of my brilliant colleagues works on this. In his most recent excess death model the numbers work out to between 9m to 18m²—so something like 15m dead looks like a likely toll so far. The wall on the South Bank would have to stretch about 38 miles to accommodate them all. And this isn’t over. The world is losing around 10,000 people every single day³. We don’t know what the global infection fatality rate is. If it averages out at 1.5%, then one billion have been infected.

It means that answers matter. A lot. Not just for the dead, but for those they left behind. And for those who are still suffering. For the singer who can now barely speak, let alone sing in the choir she loved. For those with lasting damage to their hearts or kidneys. And those who have suffered from lockdowns, or isolation. An answer to how this virus started will help the world to start to assimilate what has happened. And to decide what we should do next.

Yet the brutal reality is that the international effort to trace the origins of covid-19 has hit the buffers. Much of the work that the world would like to do relies on Chinese goodwill. This includes work on its wildlife, human blood samples, as well as in captive and farmed animals in Wuhan and Hubei. The secrecy, cover-ups, and obstruction thus far from this country do not point definitively to either a laboratory or natural source. China wishes to admit to neither option.

I was talking to one of our China correspondents, the brilliant David Rennie, who reminded me that China spent months lying about SARS in 2003, how they lied about Tiananmen Square, and about the famine between 1959 to 1961. And we now know there is plenty of evidence of a sustained effort at covering up what happened at the start of the pandemic and ongoing obstruction over releasing much-needed information.

The lying, explained David, is because China doesn’t want to be seen as fallible, as having made mistakes, or to be blamed. What that means for the rest of us is that answers are going to be hard to get.

Inside China, when playing to a domestic audience, the effort to convince those at home that the pandemic started elsewhere is gathering pace. So there are calls for an investigation into an American laboratory, a suggestion that vaping-related lung injury was covid-19. The state media runs stories about an mRNA vaccine killing people (it doesn’t). But the Chinese seem not to like that this vaccine is better than theirs.

And counter theories are not just popping up in obscure media outlets, but are being set out on the podium of the foreign ministry in Beijing—and amplified in state media⁴. A spokesperson said on August 16th, “Like other countries, China is a victim of the COVID-19 outbreak and hopes to find the source of the virus and stem the transmission of the epidemics as soon as possible”.

Further listening & reading

This is what I’ve been writing and podcasting this week.

Regardless of how covid-19 spread, we need to better prevent lab leaks. An opinion piece. The Economist. August 21st, 2021

The world needs a proper investigation into how covid-19 started. A feature on how the World Health Organisation origins investigation was knee-capped, and what the world needs to do next. The Economist, August 21st, 2021

“We need to operate on the assumption that a lab accident could have happened”—SARS-CoV-2’s origins. The Intelligence, a podcast from The Economist. August 19th, 2021.

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Corrections

After publication, the name of my colleague in China has been added, and the date of the Chinese famine changed from “1960s” to 1959 to 1961.

1. The wall was started by this group - Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK - https://www.facebook.com/CovidJusticeUK/?ref=page_internal

2. https://www.economist.com/international/2021/08/21/the-world-needs-a-proper-investigation-into-how-covid-19-started

3. According to a calculation done by the Financial Times between August 3rd and 9th https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938

4. Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying's Regular Press Conference on August 16, 2021 https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/t1899785.shtml