The Current Brouhaha Over COVID-19’s Origins Revives Concerns About Threats from Bacteriological and Viral Weapons

A reader and LinkedIn associate of mine who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, some time ago sent me a note about U.S. military concerns regarding biological weapons. He stated that the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as the Department of Defense, noted how relatively easy it was to use CRISPR, the genetic editing tool, to alter RNA and create synthetic biology and new pharmaceutical drugs.

The following are four of the concerns occupying U.S. intelligence thinking:

1. Synthetic manipulation of genetic material can be used to weaponize strains of communicable diseases that can spread throughout a nation. Even the treatment protocols can be weaponized if the variant of the communicable disease contains properties that could trigger more destructive outcomes than the disease itself. Think of manipulated versions of meningitis, smallpox, Ebola, Zika, SARS, COVID-19, Chikungunya, and Malaria, to just name a few. We could have vaccines in place to mitigate a spreading pandemic, but in the end they could trigger unforeseen consequences because of the altered biology.
2. Today medical schools train physicians, nurses, paramedics, and other health professionals to identify and treat ailments based on characteristic symptoms. But a synthesized biological weapon that infects the general population could cause confusion in how to approach those who get sick. Weaponized disease strains may present atypically leading to misdiagnoses, cause healthcare facilities to be overrun, and result in increased morbidity.
3. Weaponized disease strains may not be containable once unleashed in the environment. Like COVID-19, they could rapidly develop variants more transmissible than the original, making it tough for biopharmaceutical companies to develop responses quickly.
4. When bioweapons combine with global warming the range and impact of these diseases could be far more profound. Today, global warming is causing naturally occurring insect-borne diseases in the tropics to migrate into more temperate zones. Add to this environmental stresses such as heatwaves, prolonged droughts, floods, extreme weather events, and other climate disruptions which could all act as accelerators of weaponized biology.

Does some of this sound familiar when we think of COVID-19?

In the last month, speculation in the press has been devoted to the origins of the current pandemic. Did COVID-19 naturally occur in wildlife somewhere in China, or did it emerge from a biological laboratory?

Back in April of 2020, President Trump raised speculation with one of his “who knows” statements. He referred to COVID-19 as the Chinese virus, a more than subtle poke at Chinese biological research run amok.

The laboratories in question were the Wuhan Institute of Virology, devoted to research into coronaviruses originating in bats, and the Hubei Center for Disease Control and Prevention, a Wuhan-based facility of China’s equivalent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Could COVID-19 have been collected from bat specimens by Chinese researchers and altered in either one of these two facilities? Could it then have infected researchers in either laboratory? And from there, could it have spread to the general population in Wuhan and then travelled by air and ship to the rest of the world?

Chinese investigators concluded that the virus originated in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. The Institute of Virology is a fair distance from it, but the Hubei Center for Disease Control and Prevention lies almost right next to the market. Could the latter have leaked the virus into the market, rather than the market be the location of origin?

Based on the early contact tracing, of the first 425 patients, 45% were directly linked to the market. That’s 191 patients. But in another report published in the Lancet, it notes that Patient Zero did not have market links. So maybe, the Lancet’s Patient Zero isn’t the first case? In any event, speculation about the virus’ origin coming to rather than from the market remains.

It should be noted that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a world-class bioresearch facility. This isn’t a white coat lab but rather a place where staff don hazmat outfits and go through elaborate sanitation treatment when entering and leaving the facility. It would seem unlikely that researchers in such a facility could make a mistake and breach bioresearch containment protocols.

Nevertheless, the speculation on origins and on whether COVID-19 was a nascent bioweapon, has resulted in President Biden asking the U.S. intelligence community to pursue the subject and report back in ninety days. He has asked for the government of China’s full cooperation.

What was thought to be unthinkable, and offhandedly thrown out to the public by former President Trump, has now taken on an air of legitimacy. President Biden noted that the U.S. intelligence community has been wrestling with two scenarios, one the lab origin and the second, the market origin. He noted there is lively disagreement in the community. It is hoped, the report will lay to rest the speculation. Dr, Anthony Fauci, who has been a critical source of legitimate information on coronavirus and the pandemic, believes in the animal origins of the virus. But how it got into humans remains a question mark.

At the beginning of this post, I described the concerns of the U.S. military and intelligence communities about weaponizing biology in general. Recent events now point to a potential specific case.

So where in the U.S. does the expertise lie in looking at bioweapons and biohazards? Besides the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. military has a research laboratory, the Biological Defense Research Directorate (BDRD), located at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. Its purpose is to study the threat from biological weapons and to develop countermeasures. Ongoing research includes genomics, immunodiagnostics, countermeasures and treatment of biological hazards, and the development of testing technologies for early detection of bioweapons. BDRD invented the real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test that currently is the gold standard for testing for COVID-19.