The origin of the new coronavirus: laboratory leak or ecological crisis under capitalism?

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Given the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, virologists naturally believe that finding and understanding the source of SARS-CoV-2 is critical. However, with U.S. and Chinese geopolitical interests at odds, the realities of capitalism and imperial rivalry have hampered any such investigation.

Chris Stewart Socialist Party (ISA Ireland)

In the past month, the American bourgeois media has decisively changed its reporting method on the origin of the new coronavirus, which is due to President Biden's order to the US intelligence agencies to investigate the possibility of the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the origin of the virus and submit a report within 90 days. .

This mainly involves two claims: the first is the accidental leak caused by laboratory safety negligence, which was once characterized as "extremely unlikely" by the World Health Organization; the second is the conspiracy theory that the Trump administration is trying to incite, that the virus was deliberately instigated by China manufactured biological weapons.

Scientific evidence strongly refutes the latter. While the former possibility has not been ruled out, neither does this claim reflect any new evidence or most virologists' research. Instead, most virologists still believe that SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID-19) emerged naturally, as a result of human and/or livestock exposure to infected wild animals.

Given the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, virologists naturally believe that finding and understanding the source of SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) is critical. However, with U.S. and Chinese geopolitical interests at odds, the realities of capitalism and imperial rivalry have hampered any such investigation.

Tensions of the 'New Cold War'

Different capitalist countries and the media are actively promoting the "laboratory leak" theory, which is a wave of offensive in the "new cold war". On the other hand, the CCP regime has also deliberately obstructed the investigation into the origin of the new coronavirus.

Throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, the Chinese regime has continued to withhold key public health information. China has previously barred investigators from conducting research and manipulated data from preliminary investigations into the origin of the virus. The CCP regime is obsessed with censorship and secrecy. It only wants to report the regime's "success" and suppress news of the epidemic before it can allow the epidemic to spread in the first place. As the Sino-US conflict began to intensify three years ago, the pressure to report good news instead of bad news has also increased.

To have a truly independent investigation of the origin of the new coronavirus, neither the Chinese and American governments can be trusted. Both sides are interested only in the interests of their own bourgeoisie and have little interest in seeking the truth, not least because in doing so the capitalist system they operate and their ecologically destructive nature are bound to come into focus. Instead, at every step, they seek to manipulate the situation according to their own geopolitical goals. The Biden team has revived the controversy because they know that Beijing will never support any investigation that it cannot fully control. China will inevitably refuse to investigate, which will immediately be regarded as a victory for US propaganda, as if finding "evidence" that the CCP has concealed information.

Ecological Catastrophe and Field Theory of Capitalism

Although a complete investigation of the origin of the new coronavirus will take several years, the theory most virologists currently support is "Field Theory", which refers to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in nature from a series of "recombination events", through Evolved by infecting wild bats, wild food animals, industrial livestock, and workers in central and southern China who came into contact with these animals. Coronaviruses are known to evolve through these recombination events, and are similar to many previous viruses that infect humans, including SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), H1N1 swine flu, and even Ebola. In fact, 60-80% of new infectious diseases that infect humans come from wildlife.

Many scientists have pointed out that the possibility of a deadly plague has risen sharply over the last century, and even more so in recent decades.

Covid-19 is not the first deadly plague caused by capitalism’s destruction of the environment, nor will it be the last. The destruction of various ecosystems by agribusiness has resulted in a 3-fold increase in human infections from animal-borne diseases in the past 50 years. It is because capitalism seeks profit and destroys nature that most of the new disease outbreaks of the last 20 years have occurred.

Large agribusinesses have reaped mountains of profits, and in addition to brutally exploiting agricultural workers, they also use the harsh environment of factory animal husbandry to maximize profits. In order to allow livestock to grow faster than wild animals with the least amount of feed, genetically modified livestock are overcrowded, severely damaging the animals' immune systems.

This creates an extremely dangerous environment, where different viruses can infect these livestock and evolve into highly contagious pathogens, more often infecting agricultural workers who are forced to work unprotected in dangerous conditions.

This is an extreme example of what Marx called a "metabolic rift," showing how the logic of commodity production under capitalism disrupts nature's complex biogeochemical processes.

Climate change and massive deforestation have forced wildlife closer to industrial farms, exacerbating the problem when capital invades the planet's last virgin forests. In the case of Covid-19, it is theorized that the outbreak can be partly blamed on the use of more pesticides in industrial agriculture, which has led to a dramatic drop in insect populations, forcing infected bats to approach humans in search of food.

As a result, different pathogens come into contact with new animal groups, causing the virus to evolve. Certain species of wild animals act as "hosts" for these viruses, allowing them to spread among animals without being detected by humans. When these viruses come into contact with new hosts (livestock, humans, etc.), a "spillover event" can be harmful rather than beneficial by allowing the virus to infect a new population of organisms.

Studies have shown that the genetics of SARS-CoV-2 is extremely similar to other coronaviruses sampled from wild bats, and these data largely support the field theory. The latest research points to the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 had spread and evolved among humans, possibly among agricultural workers in rural China, before it was discovered in late 2019.

As evolutionary virologist Rob Wallace writes, “All the factors that make SARS-2 spread among animal populations in the wild and—in thousands, if not millions, of bats, livestock, and undetected human infections Medium - likely in large numbers."

Lab leaks untenable evidence for theory

The "laboratory leak" theory is not entirely dismissed by virologists, but there is little evidence to support it. The laboratory leak theory refers to a laboratory in Wuhan accidentally leaking the new coronavirus to the outside world while conducting research on "increased functions".

To clarify, there are indeed some virologists who support the laboratory leak theory. However, compared with the anti-scientific conspiracy theories promoted by the far-right camp such as Trump, who claim that the new coronavirus is a biochemical weapon deliberately synthesized and deliberately leaked by the Chinese government, the two theories are completely different.

"Add function" experiments, conducted in high-security labs, are designed to enhance viruses to predict how they will mutate in the wild to facilitate vaccine development. However, there is a real risk of virus leakage in these experiments, such as the 1977 influenza strain that could have arisen accidentally from vaccine development.

Experiments with "added functions" have indeed increased substantially in recent decades, largely driven by the aggressive efforts of large agribusinesses in "biosecurity" since the H5N1 virus (bird flu). The growing scrutiny has led them to fund "add function" labs around the world. While they should actually take action to end the ecological damage inherent in the capitalist agribusiness model, they would rather set up these labs, pretending to clean up the mess they left behind, but only act after pathogens emerge.

However, most of the "evidence" provided by the capital media for the laboratory leak theory only focuses on this statement: three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in 2019 for respiratory symptoms related to seasonal influenza. There was no evidence that they had Covid-19, and it was not uncommon for laboratory researchers to visit hospitals for regular tests.

Even though the Wuhan Institute of Virology has continued to study coronaviruses carried by bats since a SARS-like virus was discovered in a cave in Yunnan Province, these viruses are considered common, and laboratory research itself cannot prove the leak theory.

In fact, viral genes are the argument against the laboratory leak theory. Researchers have demonstrated that the spike protein that the new coronavirus uses to attach to the ACE2 receptor on human cells almost certainly arose naturally rather than made in a laboratory, and then continued to evolve through human-to-human infection.

Even if the Wuhan Institute of Virology does have the SARS-2 virus, it can be seen from the genetic code of the virus that it emerged naturally, not a man-made weapon as some right-wing conspiracy theorists refer to. The emergence of the virus can still be attributed to the metabolic disconnect between capitalism and nature.

Capitalism and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Of course, tracing the origin of the virus does not mean the end of the story. The storm is still not over, and any investigation should not stop there. What we should be asking is how an outbreak can become a global pandemic in a few months.

The global neoliberal offensive of recent decades has completely destroyed social welfare services, leaving hospitals short and under-resourced, slashing welfare guarantees around the world, and exacerbating precarious livelihoods for workers. Continuing to weaken working conditions and public services, coupled with the greedy destruction of nature for profit, it was capitalism that laid the groundwork for a plague to emerge and wreak havoc around the world, leaving the healthcare system unprepared for it.

In this regard, the laboratory leak theory is being used to obfuscate the role of capitalist governments and the system as a whole in allowing the epidemic to spread.

For example, right-wing media in India have argued that the second wave of the local epidemic was caused by Chinese biochemical weapons. In this way, the laboratory leak theory can be used to cover up the Modi regime's brutal handling of the epidemic, which allowed the virus to spread, and the widespread poverty, medical shortages, and overcrowding that millions of workers and poor people experience every day. slum life.

In the U.S., where more than 600,000 people have died from the virus, capitalist governments everywhere have refused to shut down cities and turned a deaf ear to the advice of scientists and medical workers, just to maintain the profits of big business, with disastrous consequences. At the same time, seeing the working class face disease, poverty and even death, the bourgeoisie continues to relentlessly profit from this crisis. Prices of various commodities, including personal protective equipment, hand sanitizer and oxygen, have risen in many countries.

Many people have come to the conclusion that the capitalist system is inherently inhumane and irrational. Anyone who has experienced 2020 will remember this year when every weakness in the system was maximized, and society was in chaos in all aspects. This is exactly what the capitalist ruling class fears.

need a real investigation

A true and independent scientific investigation into the origin of the new coronavirus is very important, and for this reason, no theory should be rejected until virologists have time to study it.

The world's supercapitalist powers will not allow the kind of investigation that is needed in the face of continuing deteriorating imperial conflicts, mainly between the United States and China. Even "democratic" capital countries have concealed important information about local virus outbreaks from scholars who study zoonotic diseases in order to protect multinational agribusinesses. Authoritarian countries like China are most afraid of social "unstable", and they are even more obsessed with secrets.

The U.S. did this after the H1N1 swine flu, and U.S. agribusiness is the largest exporter of the virus to the world. At present, the role of the Chinese Communist regime in the new crown pneumonia epidemic is the same. As the helm of the capitalist system, China and the United States and other countries are completely reluctant to challenge the ecological destruction of large-scale agricultural enterprises, or to take practical actions to prevent future plagues.

Any investigation into the origin of the coronavirus should be under the democratic control of workers and led by participating virologists and medical staff, not by hostile imperialist state apparatuses and their intelligence agencies. State institutions on both sides of the imperialist "new cold war" cannot take responsibility for the crises of their own making.

Such investigations do not stop at the origin of the virus, but also investigate the culpability of capitalist governments and the ruthless profit-making of corporations, how they allow the virus to spread, evolve, and destroy the world.

A real investigation must also make key claims to ensure that such incidents never happen again. For areas threatened by potential spillover events, there must be immediate and widespread investment in sustainable development in these places. To prevent the spillover of the most deadly pathogens, we must protect the complexity of forests and wetlands to preserve the ecological buffer between these disease hosts, food animals and human populations.

radical socialist measures

The world's multinational agribusinesses just want to maximize their profits, no matter how much damage they do to the planet and public health. The food industry should not be controlled by these companies.

A socialist food industry nationalized and democratically controlled by the global working class and poor masses would immediately adopt sustainable agricultural technologies, restore agricultural biodiversity, and prohibit the grossly exploitative working conditions of global agricultural workers.

The socialist planned economy is just one of many necessary measures to mend the metabolic rift between capitalism and nature. Such a system would be based on need rather than greed; it would be based on global worker solidarity rather than imperialist conflict. To achieve this vision, power must be taken back from the capitalist ruling class and placed in the hands of global workers.