“Last summer,” an Atlantic article (read it here) begins, “a University of Michigan virologist … published an essay on the need to ‘rethink’ some basic research-safety practices in light of the coronavirus pandemic. But he and his co-author—another biosecurity-board veteran—did want to make one thing clear: There was no reason to believe that sloppy or malicious science had had anything to do with the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; to suggest otherwise was ‘more akin to a conspiracy theory than to a scientifically credible hypothesis.’
“Nine months later,” the article continues, he “has a somewhat different view. ‘In my mind, the preponderance of the evidence still points toward a natural origin,’ he [said] earlier this week. ‘But that delta between the nature evidence and the lab-escape evidence appears to be shrinking.’”
Indeed it is.
After sacking a Trump-era investigative team for incompetence, President Biden has ordered U.S. intelligence agencies “to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” about whether Covid-19 was unleashed in a poorly regulated Chinese provincial “wet market” where live animals were sold for food, or escaped from a Chinese lab (possibly a bioweapons lab).
What they find out, CNN said Wednesday night, could “have massive political consequences.”
The renewed focus on the lab-escape theory springs from a Wall Street Journal article published on May 23, 2021, which revealed that several Chinese virologists who worked at the lab were hospitalized after contracting an unknown ailment.
CNN explained why Biden’s people shut down the Trump administration inquiry: “Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN medical analyst and former Baltimore Health Commissioner, said … such a probe needed to be based on a scientific method, ‘which means you don’t go into this with a preferred conclusion and then cherry pick your data to fit that conclusion.'” Trump, who politicized everything, didn’t trust our intelligence agencies. Biden does, and gave them the job of doing it right, i.e., objectively and accurately.
What if the lab-escape theory proves correct?
First, there’s unlikely to be much vindication for Trump, given “his disastrous handling of a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands on his watch,” CNN says. There will, however, be major blowback for China. It will also be a discrediting blow to the World Health Organization, whose investigators largely exonerated the Chinese despite their lack of transparency (which prompted some catcalls from the sidelines).
Already, public sentiment is shifting, which the Atlantic article calls “all the more remarkable for its lack of any major associated revelations.” We don’t know much of anything new; rather, old questions are being raised anew. And their grounding remains shaky:
“Arguments in favor of the ‘lab-leak hypothesis’ remain grounded, as they ever were, in the mere and highly suspicious fact that a coronavirus likely borne by bats, likely from a cave in southwest China, emerged 18 months ago, quite suddenly, in a city very far from southwest China—where researchers had assembled an archive of cave-bat-borne coronaviruses. Much of the rest is window dressing.”
At most, that’s a possibility, and one that remains “unlikely.” All that has changed is it no longer seems impossible. And,
“Whatever we might discover about the genesis of COVID-19 …, this historical record is bound to look more or less the same: Nearly all pandemics appear to have a natural source; possibly one or two have emerged, and more might do so in the future, from research settings.”
The article cites only one example of an outbreak for which there’s a persuasive case of a laboratory-accident cause: The 1977 Russian flu pandemic (read more about it here).
But all this is digression, so let’s get to the point.
The Atlantic writer says, “let’s stipulate that pandemics can result from natural spillovers or from laboratory accidents—and then let’s move along to implications.” The rest of the article discusses the implications for bio-research: How it’s conducted, whether it should be conducted at all, whether labs need more stringent safety measures, etc.
But everybody knows, and it goes without saying, the real “implications” are the political ones: For U.S. domestic politics, for U.S.-China relations, for W.H.O., and for funding and oversight of research of all kinds. There will be massive finger-pointing. And a positive finding that Covid-19 came from a lab would reinforce the U.S. political right’s antipathy against science of all kinds, even as those people continue to defy common-sense health measures like masks and refuse to get the vaccine shots that could save their lives,.