Stanford microbiologist Relman says lab accident 'most plausible' COVID origin

Calls for transparent forensic origins probe with broad international engagement

Stanford University microbiologist David Relman wrote in a Guardian opinion column that a laboratory accident in Wuhan is the most plausible explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic, while acknowledging the question remains unresolved.

In the piece, Relman described the public discourse around COVID-19 origins as having “devolved,” and said it had been painful to watch the July 29 Senate hearing hosted by Sen. Rand Paul that included what he characterized as a “hostile interrogation” of Anthony Fauci, the former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Relman, a professor of medicine and microbiology at Stanford and an inaugural member of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, framed the origins question as a contest between two hypotheses. The first holds that the virus spilled over naturally at one of Wuhan’s unregulated wildlife markets, a mechanism similar to the original 2002 SARS outbreak. The second posits a laboratory accident in a city that houses the world’s largest collection of bat-associated coronaviruses. Six years after COVID-19 first appeared in Wuhan in late December 2019, Relman wrote, both hypotheses “remain viable, supported by circumstantial, but not dispositive, evidence.”

“The virus has not been found in nature, nor in a lab,” Relman wrote.

On the contested points aired at the July 29 hearing, Relman wrote that both Sen. Paul and Fauci were correct within the limits of what can be publicly verified. Risky research with bat coronaviruses was conducted in Wuhan with funding from the US National Institutes of Health, Relman wrote, but the published work does not reveal a plausible COVID-19 precursor virus.

“Of course, as with any research program, we can assume that much remains unpublished,” Relman wrote.

Relman disclosed his own assessment, writing that a lab accident in Wuhan is “the most plausible explanation for Covid, given the kind of work pursued there, the fact that publications by Chinese researchers indicate knowledge about the Sars-CoV-2 virus before late December 2019, and the thousands of negative tests from suspect animal reservoirs.” He added: “But I could be wrong.”

He outlined three changes he said are needed to improve pandemic preparedness. Anyone who claims certainty about COVID-19’s origins should “back off” and accept ongoing uncertainty, Relman wrote, and an “objective and transparent forensic investigation” with broad international engagement should be conducted. Scientists and political representatives, he wrote, must accept guardrails on certain kinds of experiments and on public discussion of the trade-offs of research.

“Much is at stake: trust in science, scientists and government, not to mention our ability to thwart and respond to the next pandemic,” Relman wrote.

The commentary adds to a wider set of expert assessments around the July 29 Senate hearing on COVID-19 origins, which has drawn renewed attention to the question of how the pandemic began. Relman is a past president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and a clinical infectious disease physician in addition to his Stanford role.