Despite the enormous flood of recent reports, there’s no good evidence for a lab leak.
At the very end of 2019, a new disease began to emerge in humans: COVID-19. Originally described as a set of pneumonia-like symptoms with a hitherto unseen cause, a set of alarming facts soon came to light. A novel virus — now known to be SARS-CoV-2 — had begun infecting humans, with the first major outbreak stemming from a wet market in Wuhan: the largest city by far in the Chinese province of Hubei. The next pandemic, just as virologists and disease ecologists had been predicting for years, emerged from the continued encroachment of human civilization on territory previously inhabited solely by wild animals. Human-animal contact, responsible for pandemics ranging from SARS to MERS to Ebola to HIV, was almost certainly the culprit in bringing this novel coronavirus into the human population as well. But this explanation for SARS-CoV-2, claiming that it had a zoonotic origin, has been disputed by some, despite the lack of any publicly available scientific evidence to the contrary. Instead, according to recent claims, the virus may not have originated and spread from the wild, but could have escaped, in a lab leak, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. From the point of view of the virus’s genome, there’s no way to rule such a possibility out, so long as the virus was never characterized or reported in the lab before its escape. But is this lab leak hypothesis a legitimate scientific theory, on equal or even superior footing with the zoonotic origin theory? Or is it a conspiracy theory, without the scientific evidence to back up these wild assertions? Let’s take a comprehensive look to try and unpack everything that’s been going on. Practically every time there’s a revolutionary new phenomenon or happenstance that significantly alters the course of human society, there are a number of ideas that arise to challenge the mainstream narrative. While these can be scientifically motivated by a subset of the evidence, more often these challenges take the form of a conspiracy theory: where a number of people involved allegedly know the real, full truth behind an issue, but are covering it up, presenting an alternative narrative instead. When you mix conspiracies with science, certain people are inevitably drawn to those ideas, which include: There are certain identifiable hallmarks of these theories. They always include a large number of lines of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the full truth isn’t being told. Each claim, on its own, doesn’t carry any compelling weight, but many put a variety of (possibly unrelated) puzzle pieces together to compose a suggestive picture. Many demonstrably false claims are always included as well, and as those are debunked one-by-one, supporters of the conspiracy will move the goalposts once again, claiming something like, “well, these parts of the idea aren’t true, and those are conspiracies, but (whatever aspects remain) must be the real truth!” The other hallmark of conspiracies almost always involve some sort of guilt by association accusation. This typically manifests itself as an unclean hands argument: some statement or person that’s part of the mainstream, consensus narrative is found to have done something untrue or unethical, and therefore the entire narrative can be dismissed. Dr. Fauci, for example, caved to political pressure about encouraging people not to wear masks in order to reserve them for frontline healthcare workers, undermining the entire credibility of all subsequent public health campaigns. When Dr. Li Wenliang blew the COVID-19 whistle before succumbing to the disease in China, we learned of an uncomfortable reality: the Chinese government did try to cover up the truth about this new affliction in humans. Although these facts don’t necessarily mean that anyone lied about any other aspects of COVID-19 — Fauci, the Chinese government, or anyone else involved in combatting the worst effects of the pandemic — it’s reasonable to question such statements. Many of us wonder about what else could be getting covered up in this situation. In fact, speculations about a lab-based origin to this virus, with claims that it was engineered as a bioweapon by the Chinese government, go back as far as January 26,2020. But were those claims — and, in fact, all the claims that followed — motivated by legitimate scientific uncertainty? Or were these merely political machinations, designed to disingenuously cast blame while simultaneously justifying a wanton neglect of necessary responsibilities by numerous governments across the globe? The original conspiracy theory claimed that China was in the process of engineering a bioweapon to inflict maximum damage on human populations in enemy countries around the world: a bizarre role-reversal of an earlier conspiracy theory where China claimed that the United States engineered the original,2003 SARS virus to attack China. They claimed that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was deliberately bioengineered as a plot against humanity, was inadequately contained, then accidentally released, and then grew into the global pandemic we all continue to live through. These baseless claims were repeated by many prominent individuals — mostly politicians but including the occasional contrarian scientist — over the early months of 2020. In May, a faux-documentary touting various aspects of this conspiracy was released: Plandemic. The videos were viewed millions of times, and despite an enormous number of debunking pieces, including one tracking the horrific fraud and toxic legacy of its main “scientist” Judy Mikovitz, they continued to influence the thought processes of many, particularly of non-scientists.
