lab leak theory

In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee
Published 10 Mar 2025

Polarization of views on masks followed the same trajectory as with views about the lab leak theory. It soon became an article of faith among some Americans that mask wearing and mandates requiring it w ­ ere key to fighting the spread of Covid. Other Americans came to see the wearing of masks 204 chapter 7 as merely a form of virtue signaling. But, as with the lab leak theory, the evidence that masking the general population reduces the spread of an airborne virus was and remains inconclusive. The rancor of the debate obscures the equivocal nature of the facts. In the case of both the lab leak theory and the effectiveness of mask mandates, ­there was much more room for reasonable disagreement, and need for demo­cratic debate, than p­ olitical conditions allowed.

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Andersen defended his work but allowed, forthrightly, that “unfortunately none of this helps refute a lab origin and the possibility must be considered as a serious scientific theory (which is what we do) and not dismissed out of hand as another ‘conspiracy’ theory. We all r­ eally, r­ eally wish that we could do that (that’s how this got started), but unfortunately it’s just not pos­ si­ble given the data.”49 Andersen h­ ere admitted that the lab leak theory could not be disproved but that the impetus for “Proximal Origin” had been the desire to disprove it. ­W hatever ­else it was, the lab leak theory was not a conspiracy theory, to be “dismissed out of hand.” Nevertheless, “Proximal Origin” declared in its second paragraph, “Our analy­sis clearly shows that SARS-­CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

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Fauci retired to media acclaim—­from the same news outlets that stigmatized the lab leak theory as a conspiracy theory and that have not yet (as this book goes to press) adequately investigated the question or their own previous ­handling of it. It is the professional and public responsibility of journalists, scientists, and academics more broadly to pursue and report the truth in a disinterested manner, but too often we fall short. The New York Times reported on October 18, 2023, that the ongoing debate about the Covid Sci e nce Be n ds to Pol it ics 227 lab leak theory has stalled gain-­of-­f unction research by virologists.

Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic
by Scott Gottlieb
Published 20 Sep 2021

In all, SARS-1 had been the subject of six outbreaks since its last-known natural occurrence, each one the consequence of its escape from a laboratory: one time each in Singapore and Taiwan, and then four separate escapes from the same lab in Beijing.69 Another instance where an experiment in China had gone awry, and triggered the global spread of a novel virus, had occurred in 1977 and involved a strain of H1N1 influenza. It’s believed that the virus was carelessly released when several thousand Chinese military recruits were challenged with a live strain of the virus to test an experimental vaccine. This H1N1 strain (and its descendants) have circulated globally ever since.70 The lab leak theory has important strategic implications, and the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped shouldn’t be easily dismissed. The probability, even if it’s judged to be remote, has important implications for how we prepare against future pandemic threats. There are hundreds of BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs around the world with active pathogen research, posing a potential health and security risk if they aren’t appropriately staffed, managed, and resourced.

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If the virus had a natural origin, there’s unlikely ever to be a definitive piece of evidence that firmly establishes its source unless we find its intermediate host among a population of animals—like civet cats in the case of SARS-1, or camels in the case of MERS. So far, despite an extensive effort, no such animal population has been identified for SARS-CoV-2. As the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins observed, the lab leak theory might appear, at first blush, less plausible than a natural origin, unless you were to assemble the world’s largest repository of dangerous coronaviruses in a lab that’s located in a densely populated city, experiment with them in a lower-security facility with weak biological controls, and start infecting transgenic mammals as a way to evaluate the pathogenicity of the viral collection in the human immune system, all of which the Chinese did.73 Based on what’s publicly known, Chinese researchers had fashioned the conditions that created these risks.

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“A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest.”79 It’s also possible that the lab wasn’t the initial source of the viral outbreak, but a place where its spread was intensified by an accidental leak that contributed to ongoing spread—that there were multiple points of origin from where SARS-CoV-2 got introduced into the local population, some occurring in the lab, and some occurring in nature, perhaps at the point where a sample that might have eventually made its way to the WIV had been first collected—perhaps from the sick pangolins or some other animal host. Fully assessing the veracity of the lab leak theory, and not dismissing these potential risks prematurely, has important strategic implications for other reasons. Establishing the odds that a lab might have been a link in the initial outbreak isn’t merely a curiosity, or a political intrigue. It’s a critical question of public health preparedness.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

But I do realize, in retrospect, that I was too quick to take the official story—that it came from a wet market where wild animals were sold—at face value. If I’m honest, I accepted it because it served my own motivated reasoning and reinforced my worldview: the pandemic was a little less frightening to me if it was yet another example of humans overstressing nature and getting bitten on the ass for it. Then, as time went on, and the “lab leak theory” became a key talking point from people like Wolf and Bannon in the Mirror World, where it was mixed with baseless claims about bioweapons, along with plenty of anti-Asian racism, there seemed to be further reason not to take another look at the facts. Even though more and more facts and documents were piling up that supported a serious consideration of the lab leak hypothesis, most liberals and leftists didn’t bother looking for months because we didn’t want to be like them, in the same way that I didn’t want to be like her.

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Russia accused Ukraine … “mirror imaging”: “Putin Accuses Ukraine of ‘Dirty Bomb’ Plans, Says Risks of World Conflict High,” Reuters, October 26, 2022; “Ukraine Says Russian Troops Will Fight for Key City as Proxy Government Flees,” New York Times, October 24, 2022. feigning outrage … gloves-off U.S. interference: Julian Barnes, “Russian Interference in 2020 Included Influencing Trump Associates, Report Says,” March 16, 2021; Elaine Sciolino, “U.S. to Back Yeltsin If He Suspends Congress,” New York Times, March 13, 1993. “lab leak theory”: Rob Kuznia et al., “Weird Science: How a ‘Shoddy’ Bannon-Backed Paper on Coronavirus Origins Made Its Way to an Audience of Millions,” CNN Politics, October 21, 2020; “His Glory Presents: Take FiVe w/ Dr. Naomi Wolf,” His Glory, July 28, 2022, at 28:54. Monsanto lobbies ceaselessly … linked with cancer: Zach Boren and Arthur Neslen, “How Lobbyists for Monsanto Led a ‘Grassroots Farmers’ Movement Against an EU Glyphosate Ban,” Unearthed, October 17, 2018; “IARC Monograph on Glyphosate,” WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer; “Roundup Weedkiller ‘Probably’ Causes Cancer, Says WHO Study,” The Guardian, March 21, 2015.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections
by Mollie Hemingway
Published 11 Oct 2021

* * * While there are still many unknowns, a year later the consensus of both American intelligence agencies and the broader medical community is that it’s very likely COVID-19 originated not at a wet market, but at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Soon after President Biden came into office, the Trump administration’s investigation into whether the Wuhan lab leaked the virus was shut down. But by May 2021, Biden announced with great fanfare he was ordering America’s intelligence agencies to investigate the lab leak theory. The same day Biden relaunched the investigation, Facebook announced it would no longer censor posts discussing whether the COVID-19 virus leaked from a lab, as it had been doing for a year. PolitiFact, which had sanctimoniously made “coronavirus disinformation” its lie of the year, ended up retracting it’s harsh “pants on fire” fact-check on Dr.

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And look, some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them.” Other journalists still couldn’t bring themselves to consider the possibility that Trump had been vindicated. Apoorva Mandavilli, one of the New York Times reporters on the COVID beat, was not happy the truth was coming out. “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here,” she tweeted that same week Karl begrudgingly credited Trump. The final indignity came in June, when BuzzFeed obtained over three thousand pages of emails from Dr. Fauci through a Freedom of Information Act request. The emails detailed the country’s top infectious diseases bureaucrat’s thoughts on the handling of the pandemic, and the emails revealed top government officials had been disingenuous in their messaging to the public, as had been long suspected.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

This new and deadly virus – much deadlier than Covid-19 – took more than a year to trace back to its animal origin, which turned out to be the dromedary camel.11 Thankfully, while MERS was dangerous, it was not especially infectious, meaning that in the decade since its discovery, it has killed fewer than 1,000 people. We are not, at the time of writing, entirely certain that Covid-19 emerged from an animal reservoir, but researchers suspect that the virus may have emerged from bat populations. Even the ‘lab leak’ theory, which argues that the disease may have escaped from an infectious disease facility in Wuhan, doesn’t rule out the pathogen having originated in animals. The challenge of animal reservoirs is that we can neither control them nor predict what will emerge from them. The next disease to cross the barrier might be relatively innocuous (on a global scale, though not an individual one), like MERS, or a global catastrophe, like Covid-19.

These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means
by Christopher Summerfield
Published 11 Mar 2025

As the first waves of the pandemic washed unchecked over the US in March 2020, President Trump – no doubt keen to deflect any blame for mishandling the crisis – started to talk about the ‘China Virus’, and to tout the idea that it had originated via a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Political opponents and pundits alike rolled their eyes at another ludicrous conspiracy falling from Trump’s erratic lips. But over subsequent months, growing doubts emerged about the zoonotic origin story, and the lab-leak theory has now been endorsed by the director of the FBI, and described as ‘probable’ by a US Energy Department investigation. The line between truth and falsehood can be blurry. It is hard for LLMs and humans alike to navigate these muddy waters of fact and fiction. When LLMs fail on benchmark tests of factual accuracy, it is often because a question appears in isolation, without the contextual information that allows the model to establish the relevant truth conditions.

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 25 Jun 2024

The company used a wide range of advanced AI tools to design and optimize mRNA sequences, as well as to speed up the manufacturing and testing process.[35] Thus, within sixty-five days of receiving the virus’s genetic sequence, Moderna dosed the first human subject with its vaccine—and received FDA emergency authorization just 277 days after that.[36] This is stunning progress, considering that before COVID-19 the fastest anyone had ever created a vaccine was about four years.[37] As this book is being written, there is ongoing scientific investigation into the possibility that the COVID-19 virus might have been accidentally released after genetic engineering research in a lab.[38] Because there has been a great deal of misinformation surrounding lab-leak theories, it is important to base our inferences on high-quality scientific sources. Yet the possibility itself underscores a real danger: it could have been far worse. The virus could have been extremely transmissible and at the same time very lethal, so it is not likely that it was created with malicious intentions.