There is fairly broad consensus among scientists studying viruses that the one that causes COVID-19 originated naturally and was transmitted from animals to humans in or near Wuhan, China at some point in late 2019. But an alternate hypothesis – that she escaped a lab in this city – has been tossed around like a political soccer ball since the pandemic began and has never been treated more gullibility than in the last few days.
Is there any new evidence that a lab leak may have occurred? Not really; Scientifically, nothing has changed that would change the opinion of experts. Despite nearly a year and a half of research, scientists and governments have still not been able to pinpoint the exact source of the coronavirus. So technically it’s still an open question.
What got this Wuhan laboratory leak theory back on the news?
The Wall Street Journal earlier this week reported Three researchers from the Wuhan laboratory were hospitalized in November 2019 (the virus was officially discovered in December). Their symptoms were consistent with those of COVID-19, but they were also consistent with “seasonal illness” – in other words, they could just have had a cold or the flu.
This new information is hardly a smoking weapon, but it just came out as the World Health Organization prepared the next phase of its investigation into the origins of the virus.
President Biden then announced that he asked the secret services within 90 days for a report on what is known about the possible origins of the coronavirus. It’s unlikely they’ll learn anything in the next 90 days that hasn’t been learned in the last year and a half, but the topic has always been political and that is how it plays out. The Democrats and the GOP argue about this; The US and China are threatening it examine each other.
G / O Media can receive a commission
Could the virus have been created in a laboratory and used as a bioweapon?
According to experts, this scenario is extremely unlikely. Genetic analysis has shown that it is very similar to another coronavirus that has existed in the wild, in bats, and in another area of China. It has no characteristics of a change in a laboratory. You can Read more about this theory from a genetic researcher here.
There’s a plausibility problem here too: the whole idea of a bioweapon – any weapon – is that you need to be able to use it against your enemy without it killing you at the same time. Rifles shoot from a distance; Bombs are strategically placed or dropped. A highly contagious virus would be a bad weapon as there are no limits to containing it for just the intended victims. And the coronavirus has actually spread around the world.
Okay, if the virus hadn’t been created in a lab, would it have been naturally detected and then escaped?
This is much more plausible than the idea that the virus was created or released on purpose, but very few experts consider it likely. However, it is worth taking a look as it is not entirely impossible.
Part of the work in the Wuhan laboratory has been to study a variety of coronaviruses, including many from bats, to see what makes some of them so dangerous. (Remember, SARS was another coronavirus with a possible bat origin and was responsible for a scary but short-lived pandemic that began in Asia in 2003.)
Some background information on SARS, other coronaviruses and what is currently known about the possible natural origin of the virus that causes COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2 as it is officially called), this overview from Science News explains it well. In short, tracking down the source of a virus is really difficult because there are so many different animal viruses, and finding the specific virus most closely related to COVID-19 is a needle in a haystack problem. The origins of the SARS virus weren’t exactly known until 2017, and it may take years to figure out the origins of COVID-19 as well.
