Surveying the Lab Origin/Lab Leak landscape
This morning someone sent me a story from The Telegraph (UK), published yesterday, and asked for my thoughts.
The only thing ‘new’ here is a major newspaper rehashing information that has already been reported and more ‘officially’ endorsing the lab leak hypothesis. If that isn’t reason enough for you to say to yourself, “Yeah, Self, maybe this was/is a psy-op…” then I am not sure what to tell you except that you might still be trapped in a false binary intended to keep you from questioning whether something was spreading and in need of slowing, besides lies.
Interesting. Escaped how? Escaped when?
If you are a Lab Leak proponent, please walk me through this. I’m not a scientist, didn’t come into this mess with the burden benefit of relevant coursework & professional experience, and have been asking pointed questions about the physics since January 2023.
I admit to not being able to explain the ins and outs of statements like RNA can’t pandemic. Yet, I can see those who assert as much are able to defend their reasoning to the hilt and am among those saying YES gain-of-function research is conducted but NO it cannot yield globe-trotting ‘pandemic potential’ coronaviruses (here and here).
“Lab ORIGIN!!!” some say. “It was released!”
Okay.
Released how? Released when? Released where? What’s the timeline here? Tell me the method(s) used. Direct? Indirect? See the helpful table at this end of this article, if needed.
The Lab Landscape
Jay Bhattacharya
In a 2024 interview, incoming NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya defined a Lab Leak this way:
He seems to believe that SARS-CoV-2 was either created or altered in a lab and entered the wider world by hitching a ride on a lab worker, who then transmitted it to others. Based on his public statements and interactions with me and others, Bhattacharya also appears to have made up his mind on the question of whether a pandemic involving a lab-origin coronavirus occurred.
Meryl Nass
Meryl Nass (I think) holds a view similar to what Bhattacharya has implied, but my colleagues and I had difficulty getting her to elaborate with respect to mechanism. (See here.)
Michael Shellenberger
Michael “Case Closed” Shellenberger and his colleagues argue that the virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) via infected worker(s) sometime in autumn 2019, and was followed by human-to-human transmission. The fact that their story names a specific individual—Ben Wu—doesn’t make it any more plausible or less Hollywood.
As far as I know, Shellenberger et al don’t try explain why this lightening-fast pathogen was “spreading” and didn’t show up in any data or on-the-ground experiences prior to the launch of testing and emergency declarations.
(To be fair, I’ve yet to hear a persuasive explanation for this from any Lab-Origin or Zoonotic-Origin proponent. This is where those who say There are no viruses or – the view I hold – There was no novel, risk-additive spreading coronavirus – provide more reasonable explanations.)
Matt Ridley & Alina Chan
Matt Ridley has taken pains to “set the stage” for a Lab Origin. (See here.) Unfortunately, he hasn’t explained how his Antagonist – a virus – left the lab scene and made its way everywhere else.
Observations about the traits of a thing, plus the place where the thing is supposed to have been adulterated or created, minus (or absent) a hypothesis about how the thing traveled from its place of origin, or why the thing “behaved” in the way that testing patterns and differential death curves depict, equals wishful thinking.
Ridley’s co-author, Alina Chan, is “not 100% convinced ‘Covid’ came from a lab” – which is good news ..which is good, because the name and determination about COVID-19 as a ‘disease’ came from the WHO. The virus story as she tells it here is also incomplete and contains serious plot holes.
Clare Craig
Pathologist Clare Craig claims SARS-CoV-2 is a “manmade” virus but acknowledges there’s no way (at least for her) to prove where it was created.
She says, “Within a few days, the virus can traverse most of the world,” and describes a spread mechanism once the virus is “out there” (see image below). However, she hasn’t proposed any possible routes through which the virus departed the lab(s).
My lingering questions about her views are here.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
In some ways, the CIA’s written assessment about the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was made with “low confidence,” is one of the more honest statements about this entire affair.
Incredibly, it was WIDELY misinterpreted by people on all sides as endorsing a Lab Origin or Lab Leak view. As I’ve explained, the agency said nothing about a lab, named no countries, and did not use the word virus.
We are Still Being Misled
Look, I know everyone is tired. I know stories like the one in The Telegraph or the op-ed penned by scientific propagandists in The New York Times feel like wins — or ‘miracles’, as Jenin Younes put it.
Sadly, they’re really not, and we are still being badly misled.
If you’re going with “It came from a lab,” I won’t stop you. But let’s go the whole nine yards, think this through, and stop pretending that magic is a good substitute for scientific thinking and common sense.
Somehow, it must have escaped explains nothing.
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