Pandemic origins: Shaky discourse around lab-leak hypothesis

Imagine yourself, if you can, in the months before the Covid-19 pandemic. Imagine being told then that a novel virus would emerge in China that would then spread around the world, infecting much of the global population, by some estimates killing more than 20 million people, and upending much of humanity’s social, political and economic life along the way.

Imagine you were then told that some experts believed that this new virus raised questions about the safety of certain kinds of scientific research, in which virologists collected rare viruses out in the wild, brought them to facilities in or near cities and in some cases tinkered with them there to help prevent or better respond to future pandemics.

Imagine that none of this was presented to you in partisan or nationalistic terms. Imagine that Donald Trump had not been president and that nobody used the term “bioweapon.” And then imagine that a question was put to you: What would the chances have to be that a lab accident was the origin of the pandemic to justify a broad and public conversation about the safety of that research?

What would you say? That a lab-leak theory would have to be proved definitively, beyond any shadow of a doubt, to prompt such a pointed conversation? Or that it would have to be simply likelier than not — a “preponderance of evidence” standard, as lawyers sometimes put it — to generate a global reckoning over lab safety procedures and the wisdom of doing research, called gain-of-function, that can make pathogens more dangerous?

That is the standard that has recently been reached by a group within the Department of Energy, which, according to reporting published Sunday in The Wall Street Journal, revised its own assessment and has now “concluded” — though with only “low confidence” — that the pandemic most likely began with a laboratory leak. The F.B.I. previously came to a similar conclusion, theirs with “moderate confidence.”

Four other government agencies and a national intelligence panel have reached the opposite perspective, that the pandemic had what is called a natural or “zoonotic” origin. Two other agencies commissioned reviews that reached an uncertain conclusion.

None of the follow-up stories about the new D.O.E. conclusion have offered any new evidence in support of it, which makes the news less like a reversal or revelation, justifying claims of vindication and bursts of recrimination, than one additional data point floating beside many others. However the leak may have played on your social media feed, it does not indicate a new consensus but the opposite: a glaring reminder of the complexity of the known facts, with different narratives imposed by different factions trying to make sense of the same uncertain picture. When the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was asked about the report on CNN on Sunday, he could do little more than essentially shrug, promising that the administration was doing everything it could to investigate the origins of the pandemic but confessing in the same breath that opinion within U.S. intelligence was defined by uncertainty and disagreement.

This puts us in a strange epistemological limbo for such a mystery: No genuine proof seems to have arrived, one way or the other, three years on, in part because investigations have been largely stonewalled by China. That means that anyone contemplating the origins of the pandemic and its relevance for lab safety is operating to some degree from positions of ambiguity and probability.

But if you had been told, back in 2019, that this would be the state of knowledge in 2023, would it not seem extremely weird to you that there has not been a broad public conversation about the wisdom of potentially dangerous virological research in the meantime? That so much more oxygen had been eaten up by partisan theater than by public debate over the policy implications of such a possibility? And that the most significant set of reforms yet proposed — those issued a month ago by an expert panel from the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and now being reviewed by the White House — were put together quietly, with little public attention paid to them beyond those already engaged in lab-safety debates?

The boundaries of mainstream discourse have suggested that we should resolve the matter of pandemic origins before moving on to the implications of the lab-leak hypothesis. But this has proved a paralysing standard, and not just because so little definitive progress has been made on the central detective work. The question of how the deadliest pandemic in a century began is an undeniably consequential one. But so is the matter of what steps to take given that it remains to so many — including Anthony Fauci — an open question.

And personally, I think that if I were asked what the chances of an accidental outbreak would have to be to justify a loud and public reckoning over lab safety, I would put the number much lower than full proof. In fact, much lower even than “preponderance of evidence” — as low as 5 percent, perhaps, or 1 percent or less. Truthfully, I’m not sure that it would need to be any higher than zero, given that early in 2020, many of those scientists who would become the most stalwart critics of the lab-leak theory privately acknowledged that the origins of the pandemic were very much up for debate and that a laboratory leak was a perfectly plausible — perhaps even the most likely — explanation for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan a few months earlier.

Since they were obtained by BuzzFeed via a FOIA lawsuit and published in a June 2021 article, a series of emails between many of the world’s top virologists sent on the last day of January and early days of February 2020 have formed one locus of lab-leak attention. In one, the evolutionary biologist and virologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research described the new virus as “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” In another, Jeremy Farrar, then-director of the Wellcome Trust and the incoming chief scientist of the World Health Organization, summarized the perspectives of several other scientists, including Michael Farzan of Scripps, who had put his odds as “70:30” or “60:40” in favor of an “accidental release.” Farrar himself put the odds at “50:50.”