ARGUMENT: Covid-19 originsThe Origins of Covid-19 and Preventing the Next Pandemic

Did COVID-19 originate with bats or scientists? Most experts continue to contend that the most likely origin of SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19) is a natural zoonotic “spillover” event between an animal reservoir (most likely bats) and humans. Amanda Moodie and Nicholas Evans write in War on the Rocks that over the last year of the pandemic, however, another theory has gained momentum: The SARS-CoV-2 virus may have resulted from an accident in a laboratory in China where scientists were working with closely related viruses.

In the wake of the World Health Organization-led mission to Wuhan to examine the origins of the pandemic, proponents of the lab-leak theory have charged the investigative team with conflicts of interest, and suggested that the team’s efforts failed to rule out the possibility of a lab release. Some have gone on to claim that scientists have maintained a conspiracy of silence about the possibility of a lab release in order to protect their funding or avoid a backlash from their government.

Moodie and Evans write that the desire to identify the origins of the novel coronavirus is perfectly understandable. COVID-19 has killed millions of people and upended everyday life. There’s an intuitive sense that finding out how the pandemic began might help to prevent another one from occurring.

However, while answering the question of where the novel coronavirus came from is important, many of the most important policy decisions the United States needs to make to prevent future pandemics do not depend on viral origins. Very little about pandemic response or preparedness for future pandemics turns on the particulars of how this one started. Laboratory biosafety was already an issue before the pandemic, and the origins of this particular virus don’t change the need for reform to prevent these rare but potentially catastrophic events. Regardless of how COVID-19 began, U.S. policy priorities should focus on both identifying and preventing the spread of zoonotic pathogens and bolstering safety and security in high-containment laboratories.

Moodie and Evans stress, however that there is one important scenario in which it would be absolutely vital to know the origins of COVID-19 in order to decide what to do next.

If, as some scientists and politicians have suggested, the pandemic stemmed from a deliberate attempt to develop a biological warfare agent, this would have serious implications for the Biological Weapons Convention and the broader norm against the use of disease as a weapon. If a state party had violated its commitment to the treaty by developing biological weapons, the international community would need to determine how to hold that government accountable for its non-compliance — a process with which states parties to the treaty have struggled in the past. Even treaties that have extensive verification provisions have grappled with what to do when a state party has demonstrably violated a treaty’s prohibitions. While some might criticize the Biological Weapons Convention for lacking a mechanism to verify compliance, such mechanisms don’t solve the knotty political problem of what to do when flagrant violations take place. Moreover, the deliberate use of biological weapons could inspire copycat behavior by others, leading to the weakening of the norm against the use of disease as a weapon. Fortunately, to our knowledge no serious analysis of COVID-19’s origins — even from those who support a laboratory release hypothesis — has concluded that anyone deliberately introduced the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the global population.