What Scientists Do and Don’t Know about COVID-19 Origins | The Rise of the Coronavirus Lab-Leak Theory | The Lab Leak Theory Doesn’t Hold Up, and more

Yet although lab spillovers do happen, the vast majority are rapidly contained.
Given that history, it was no surprise that theories around COVID-19’s supposed lab origins emerged. But this time around, it’s not just idle speculation. It’s being taken as a serious possibility by some of the highest levels of the U.S. government—and by media keen for a new narrative.

How COVID-19’s Origins Were Obscured, by the East and the West  (Nicholas Wade, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Some 20 months after the Covid-19 pandemic first broke out, its origins remain obscure. A vigorous campaign of concealment by the Chinese authorities is the principal reason. But China received considerable help, strange to say, from senior medical research officials in the United Kingdom and United States who mishandled and effectively derailed the initial inquiry into the virus’s origins.

The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins  (Katherine Eban, Vanity Fair)
On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”
The statement struck Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland Demaneuf, as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.

After the Lab-Leak Theory, U.S.-Chinese Relations Head Downhill  (Yanzhong Huang, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
In October, 2018, more than a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, dozens of international trainees visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology for an expansive workshop meant to “promote the cooperation between China and other countries in the field of biosafety.” The attendees, many from developing countries, took classes on virus handling and bioethics, they listened to speeches by Chinese and UN arms control officials, and learned from eminent scientists. For the organizers, the 10-day event was a chance to showcase China’s expertise in biosafety management. And for this, they could hardly have chosen a more perfect location, a prestigious virology institute that had just months earlier opened the country’s first state-of-the-art, specialized facility for safely studying the world’s most dangerous pathogens, a biosafety-level (BSL) 4 lab.
The marketing plan hasn’t paid out.

The Sudden Rise of the Coronavirus Lab-Leak Theory  (Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New Yorker)
Washington, D.C., has little love for mystery. Politicians prefer the news to supply certainty: two antagonists, clear moral stakes, the chance to take a side. But for more than a year the starting point of the dominant political story, the coronavirus pandemic, has been mysterious.
Among conservatives, predisposed to hawkishness toward China, where the virus had come from, attention focused on the possibility that the covid-19 pathogen had emerged from a Chinese lab, either by accident or design. Liberals sought a more explicit alignment with scientific investigators, and favored an account in which the virus had migrated naturally from animals to humans, possibly through the Chinese markets where exotic animals are sold for human consumption. The right’s theory, at best, blamed science run amok, and at worst, suspected an unprecedented act of biowarfare. (“It was the ‘incompetence of China,’ and nothing else, that did this mass Worldwide killing,” President Trump tweeted in May, 2020.) The left’s theory blamed an unreconstructed pre-modern approach to wildlife that, instead of protecting it, killed and ate it.
For a year, each camp occupied the seats that they liked best: liberals in the mainstream, conservatives on the fringe. This spring, though the evidence for either side has not changed much, there has been news in this area. Scientists and political commentators have become less swift to dismiss the lab-leak theory. And so, the political debate over the pandemic’s origins became a case study in something else: how the political world does and doesn’t change its mind.

China Is Pushing Its Own Coronavirus Lab Leak Theory in Latest Battle of Narratives  (Eduardo Baptista and Cyril Ip, SCMP)
Call it a tale of two laboratories: the Fort Detrick Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in the US, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and a competing narrative about the origins of Covid-19.
Odds are that most Americans have never heard of Fort Detrick, about an hour’s drive from Washington and the original home of the US biological weapons program.
But hundreds of millions of Chinese netizens are familiar with the Detrick name and its supposed links to Covid-19, mostly thanks to China’s so-called Wolf Warrior diplomats.
They have said dozens of times in social media posts and press conferences that Fort Detrick, half a world away from China in the state of Maryland, needs to be investigated as a potential source of the virus.

The Case against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory  (Lindsay Beyerstein, New Republic)
Most theories about the pandemic starting with a bioengineered virus are less plausible than the simpler alternative: bats being bats.
In the past month, we’ve seen a second wave of interest in the theory that the Covid-19 pandemic began with a lab leak. Last spring, the media accurately reported the scientific consensus that Covid (also known as SARS CoV-2) is a natural virus that probably evolved much the same way as the last two deadly human coronaviruses, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-COV) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-COV): namely, from bats, probably by way of an intermediate species like a raccoon dog, a ferret badger, or even a feral cat. Ever since the SARS outbreak of 2002–03, after all, paper after paper and countless popular pieces have warned that, sooner or later, nature would produce the next big SARS.
Now some—latching on to new reporting, researchers’ open letter to Science magazine calling for greater investigation into the virus’s origins, and the Biden administration’s willingness to use the possibility of a lab leak to demand more transparency from China—argue media outlets were too quick to dismiss the lab leak theory. Substacker Matt Yglesias even called the media’s deeply skeptical coverage of lab leak theories a “fiasco” and “a huge fuckup.”
Despite the allure of this contrarianism, though, 20 years of post-SARS research into the origins and spread of bat coronaviruses point to a natural origin for Covid-19. Upon closer inspection, the so-called “new” evidence that has entranced pundits is neither new nor compelling. Lab leak theory proponents are also glossing over serious flaws in their proposed narratives of Covid-19’s origin.

Republican Report Says Coronavirus Leaked from China Lab; Scientists Still Probing Origins  (Reuters)
A preponderance of evidence proves the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese research facility, said a report by U.S. Republicans, a conclusion that U.S. intelligence agencies have not reached.
The report also cited “ample evidence” that Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) scientists - aided by U.S. experts and Chinese and U.S. government funds - were working to modify coronaviruses to infect humans and such manipulation could be hidden.

The Right Way to Investigate the Origins of COVID-19  (Thomas J. Bollyky and Yanzhong Huang, Foreign Affairs)
Only an Independent Coalition of Scientists Can Reach a Definitive Answer