If a military team made a mistake during a nuclear war preparedness exercise and accidentally obliterated millions of people, you would not expect to find some of the very same people merrily admitting a couple of years later that they have carried out the very same kind of exercise with different live nukes and slightly fewer safeguards. Would you?
That is roughly what I recently found out has apparently been going on in China. The Wuhan laboratory that conducted risky experiments on bat viruses at inadequate biosafety levels and almost certainly caused the pandemic has now revealed that it has done the same kind of risky experiments on another lot of horseshoe-bat viruses at low biosafety levels. Is accidentally killing millions not enough to give them pause?
Worse, a western scientific journal, the Journal of Virology, has blithely published the whole thing as if it was just another day at the office. There in the acknowledgments of Peng Zhou’s paper are his old pals from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli and Ben Hu, the main authors of the notorious experiments in Wuhan. You know: the ones where they swapped the spike genes between bat viruses, making brand new viruses that could infect human cells better and kill humanized mice faster.
To be fair, the latest experiments are on alpha coronaviruses, not the beta kind that caused the pandemic, and on ones that kill pigs by causing diarrhea, not people by causing pneumonia. The disease goes by the name of SADS, for “swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus.” The backstory is that starting in October 2016, an outbreak of diarrhea killed nearly 25,000 piglets on farms in the Guangdong province in China. By the spring of 2017, smart work by Peng Zhou in Wuhan had identified a coronavirus from horseshoe bats as the cause. So much is known already and documented in the 2021 book I wrote with Alina Chan: Viral.
At the time the scientists were intrigued to find that SADS came from the same genus of bats as SARS: rhinolophus, named for the horseshoe shape of their nose. There seems to be something about horseshoe bats in particular that makes them good at hosting highly infectious coronaviruses. It might be the fact that they roost in very large, very dense colonies in natural caves, rather than dispersed in tree holes or the roofs of buildings like most other kinds of bats.
SADS affected pigs but is known to be capable of infecting human cells in the lab, so even handling it in experiments is risky. What is this we read halfway down the first page of the new paper? “Recombinant SADSr-CoVs could replicate efficiently in respiratory and intestinal cell lines and human- and swine-derived organoids and caused varying tissue damage and mortality in suckling mice.”
Yup, they deliberately infected human cells and “human lung organoids” with man-made SADS viruses! In live, suckling mice the result of their meddling with viral genes was a 10,000-fold increase in viral growth in the brain. Leaving the darned viruses in pigs and bats is not good enough for these cowboys: they are souping them up and training them on mice and men. For what? To prove there is a risk? Well, we knew that already.
The reaction of some western scientists to the publication of the paper was furious. “The research has no civilian application whatsoever. The only potential products of this research are weapons of mass destruction,” Professor Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University, told the Berliner Zeitung. “This information is available to any rogue state with a virology lab – free of charge,” said virologist Simon Wain-Hobson, of the Pasteur Institute.
However, before you get too alarmed, there may be one reassuring factor. Despite the paper’s length, a vital and surprising detail is entirely missing: the year in which the experiments were done. Indeed the paper seems to be deliberately vague about places and dates. In a paper published in 2018, the same team at least said which location in Yunnan they collected bat samples from. Peng Zhou was based in Wuhan during the pandemic but has now relocated to Guangzhou, together with Shi Zhengli. It is unclear whether the work was done in Wuhan or Guangzhou. I have askedDr. Peng’s colleague Lun Yuo to clarify when and where the experiments were done, without a response so far.
On closer examination, Alina Chan and I now think the key work was probably done before the Covid pandemic, though we cannot be sure. Piecing together what is in the paper, Maarten de Kock, head of a laboratory in the Hague, has come up with the following likely timeline.
In 2017-19, the same years that the work on bat viruses related to what would become Covid were done in Wuhan, Dr. Zhou did near identical experiments on bat viruses related to the SADS pig disease. He and Dr. Yun Luo made an “infectious clone” of one of the viruses, swapped the spike genes of nine wild bat viruses into copies of the clones, making live “chimera” viruses (never seen before in nature), and infected cell cultures and mice.
Then in 2020 when the world learned about Covid, as de Kock puts it, “any paper with ‘Chinese lab + recombinant bat coronavirus + human-cell infection + 100% mouse lethality’ became radioactive.” So the manuscript sat in a drawer (or circulated privately) while the political climate was sensitive. In 2024, when scrutiny had died down, Peng and his team dusted it off, submitted it to a western journal and it sailed through peer review.
The reassuring part of this theory is that they may have done these experiments before the pandemic revealed just how idiotic it is to go round making new viruses and training them on human tissues. Even the possibility, let alone the near certainty, that pandemic prevention research caused a pandemic testifies to criminal foolishness. To risk doing it again a few years later would be truly unhinged. It would be nice if they could let us know, but these scientists are under the strict control of the Chinese Communist party and are not free to talk to western journalists, of course.
Even if the experiments were done before the pandemic, such gain-of-function tests are highly dangerous and had very little upside. Besides, it hardly excuses the journal’s decision to publish them now. What in the devil’s name are the editors doing printing this paper, and peer reviewers doing approving it? They have given rogue regimes and terrorists around the world intricate details of the recipe for how to construct novel infectious viruses. They even tell the terrorist where to order the ingredients.
Making money is the short answer as to why this got published. Chinese scientists garner cash rewards for publishing in prestigious journals and journals get fat fees from the scientists’ institutions. The incentives to refuse to publish are therefore scant. “It is irresponsible for journals to publish dangerous gain-of-function studies,” thundered Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, head of the US National Institutes of Health, in November, alongside a picture of Dr. Strangelove.
The key question that never seems to be addressed by the defenders of gain-of-function experiments of this kind is how we, the people, get to influence whether such experiments go ahead. The decision to handle a toxic chemical in a lab is a matter for the scientists and their immediate neighbors; a decision to handle an infectious virus is a matter for the entire human population. We are all put at risk if something goes wrong, no matter how far from the lab we live.
Yet the virologists who have closed ranks, and the editors of the key journals, act as if journalists like me, and other “lay” folk, are impertinent for sticking our noses into matters that are none of our business. “Leave it to us,” they say: “we know what we are doing.”
Yet we all caught that damned virus – three times so far in my case. We all lost friends and loved ones. We all suffered immense inconvenience and cost. We deserve to have a say on which kinds of experiments are done in future.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
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