The WHO estimates COVID-19 mortality at around 7 million, but excess mortality estimates that include deaths caused by indirect impacts of the pandemic take the figure to around 15 million. The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) puts it even higher, at between 18 and 21 million. Clearly, the lessons from such a huge tragedy must be well learnt to avoid repetition of mistakes. This article confines itself to just one highly debated issue—the COVID-19 origin debate—from which much remains to be learnt for the safety of future years.
The debate on COVID origin has continued long after the pandemic was over. In July this year (2026), the world witnessed the strange sight of the top US expert on this subject, Dr Anthony Fauci, repeatedly refusing to answer questions before a Senate Committee when summoned under a subpoena. If you have nothing to hide, why be so elusive and reluctant?
Earlier, in late January 2025, reports emerged that the CIA had released a new analysis saying it now favours the lab-leak theory of the origin of COVID-19, pushing back the wet market theory. The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee immediately stated, "Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world." However, it is wrong to take such a highly partisan, one-sided view, considering that much wider concerns of bio-safety are involved. Even if attention is narrowly confined to Chinese research associated with the lab-leak, the USA has to reckon with the fact that the financing for a lot of such research originated from the USA.
It is a paradox that the research which became most controversial in the COVID origin debate involved a high-risk project in a Chinese lab being pursued with US funds. This created a curious situation in which, at least initially, powerful persons on both sides had an interest in covering up several inconvenient facts.
The COVID origin debate has seen a division between those who emphasize environmental and wet market (natural) factors and those who emphasize lab-leaks. This deep divide should not obscure the wider reality that important global reforms are needed on both sides, yet neither is getting adequate attention. Reforms relating to both possibilities should not be postponed till a final settlement of the controversy.
The natural transmission theory draws attention to several aspects of increasing ecological degradation—indiscriminate deforestation, risky contact between wildlife and human beings, consumption of certain types of meat and animal products, and unhealthy conditions in which some animals and birds are bred, slaughtered, and traded. There is obviously much need for reform in all these respects, including restrictions and curbs accompanied by provision of alternative livelihoods for adversely affected people. These reforms are needed not just to reduce pandemic possibilities but also to check climate change, protect biodiversity and animal welfare, and produce healthy food linked to sustainable livelihoods. In this context, the situation in some meat marketing areas of China and some other countries has been reported to be risky, but the situation in some factory farms in the USA and western countries, where animals and poultry birds are kept in highly unsatisfactory conditions, is also risky.
The other possibility points to COVID-19 origin being linked to a lab-leak. Even earlier, the safety basis of the proliferation of work on very dangerous viruses involving their lab-storage, transport, and manipulation had been questioned, particularly as viruses are routinely being created in labs that are more dangerous than those existing in nature. While earlier some high-risk labs in the USA had been more in the news, subsequently the hasty setting up of some high-risk labs in China, particularly in Wuhan, attracted much controversy.
Is this work really so necessary as to be pursued on a large and increasing scale? Even if there are some potential benefits, are the risks and dangers still higher? Isn't it true that earlier also bio-lab leaks have been excessive and often involved very dangerous possibilities? Extrapolating from earlier lab-leaks and related accidents, what is the mathematical probability of a very serious accidental release taking place once a decade, or even once in five years?
Most of the recent increase in concern is attributed to the possibility that COVID-19's origin is related to the leak of a genetically engineered coronavirus from a virology lab in Wuhan—a virus which was in all probability engineered to be more harmful and infectious to human beings. This work was part of a gains-of-function research project, inherently risky but justified by some experts on the ground that it would help in facing potential future pandemics. This view has been widely contested.
Regardless of whether this is accepted as the most likely COVID-19 origin, the fact that this was very high-risk research cannot be denied. The worrying fact is that many such high-risk projects, with military use linkages, are continuing unabated in several parts of the world. A more basic issue than raising bio-safety levels is to identify research inherently of a very high-risk category, which should then be given up. Another reason for caution relates to the possibility of terrorists misusing knowledge emanating from such research.
A listing of avoidable types of research was made in the report "Biotechnology Research in an Age of Terrorism" prepared by the US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine: demonstrating ways of making vaccines ineffective; conferring resistance to antibiotics and anti-viral agents; enhancing a pathogen's virulence; increasing transmissibility of a pathogen; altering the host range; enabling a pathogen's ability to evade diagnostic modalities; and enabling the weaponisation of a biological agent or toxin. Important narrow advantages relating to commercial, economic, career, and military aspects are associated with such research, which is why it has been promoted on a wide scale despite the dangers.
In October 2015, the US government imposed a moratorium on some aspects of this research, defined as research that "improves" the ability of a pathogen to cause disease. However, the moratorium was not complete, as an exemption clause allowed funding to continue if the head of the funding agency determined the research was urgently necessary to protect public health or national security. This exemption was in fact used to continue funding some research of the pause category, including a highly controversial project on altered coronaviruses experimented on humanized mice at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It would be very useful to know whether the exemption was made on grounds of public health or national security! Scientists who had welcomed the moratorium were disappointed when it was lifted in December 2017.
Dr Mark Lipsitch and Dr Thomas Inglesby had earlier written an important paper calling for a moratorium on research intended to create novel potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs), arguing that such experiments should be subjected to rigorous quantitative risk assessment, including risks of deliberate misuse. Earlier, a paper in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had noted that the SARS virus had already escaped from labs three times between 2003 and 2011, and that even the highest category BSL4 labs had seen three escapes between 1990 and 2011. Assuming a rather low probability of accident, the paper calculated an 80 per cent chance of a dangerous virus escaping from at least one of the nearly 42 labs then engaged in live PPP research within 12.8 years—a very high probability indeed.
Clearly, a worldwide moratorium should be considered, followed by an international commission of scientists and bioethicists, selected carefully to exclude those who derive personal gain from such research, to examine all aspects of this controversial issue with the precautionary principle as guide.
The controversy regarding research at Boston University's National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) revived these concerns. As reported, a team of 14 scientists developed a new strain of COVID-19 that killed 80 per cent of infected mice. Senator Roger Marshall stated that this research involved "lethal gain of function virus research" with the "potential to kill more people than any single nuclear weapon." A senior NIAID official stated that the research team's original grant application did not specify that the scientists wanted to do this precise work.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who chaired the COVID-19 Commission created by the Lancet, testified before a US House Committee in March 2023 that the origin issue is very important: if the virus emerged from a laboratory, it reveals the remarkable danger of ongoing gain-of-function research largely unknown to Congress and the public, with little if any oversight. He noted that the presence in the SARS-CoV-2 genome of a "Furin Cleavage Site" (FCS)—absent in all other known SARS-related viruses—dramatically increases transmissibility and pathogenicity, and that US and Chinese scientists had, in a 2018 DARPA proposal, explicitly proposed inserting an FCS into a SARS-related coronavirus. He further stated that NIH leaders kept the gain-of-function research hidden from Congress and the public, repeatedly misleading them, and that a highly misleading paper, "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," deflected attention from the possibility of a laboratory origin.
It is evident that to find out the truth regarding COVID-19's origin, a lot more records from the USA are needed, and a lot more transparency from the Chinese side as well. This is needed not for academic research alone but for saving the lives of millions from the possibility of future such threats.
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield stated that bio-security is "our nation's greatest national security threat" and called for a halt to gain-of-function research. He said, "I am not aware of any advanced therapeutic or vaccine that has come to pass because of gain-of-function research."
Coming back to the CIA report favouring the lab-leak theory, it is important to emphasize that this should lead not to narrow targeting of political or strategic opponents, but instead to much wider concerns of ensuring bio-safety for the entire world. In addition, the terrorist-related bio-risk has been increasing, and rapid advances in AI are adding greatly to bio-risks— a fast-emerging area that must get very careful attention.
The time has come to give long-overdue priority to safety concerns. While the debate rages, reforms on both sides—reducing lab-leak related possibilities as well as natural origin possibilities—should go ahead, as all of these are urgently needed regardless of how the debate plays out.
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The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Man over Machine, A Day in 2071 and Protecting Earth for Children
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