Five years ago today, with more than 2,000 cases of Covid-19 confirmed and the numbers doubling roughly every four days, the then taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, appealed to the public to stay home, “to make the sacrifices, not out of self-interest, but for the love of each other.”
Already, the idea that Covid-19 escaped from a laboratory or was even designed in one had begun to take root and was being promoted by conservative voices online and in the media. Ever since, the theory has endured and grown in the public imagination. A recent CIA re-appraisal of the evidence concluded that a laboratory-based origin was most probable. This, coupled with a spate of high-profile articles supporting lab-leak conjecture, has cemented the impression that there must be some substance to this notion.
Much mainstream scientific opinion would strongly disagree – and for good reason. The Covid lab-leak theory is a useful example of the disconnect between scientific evidence and public perception.
The most credible variant of the many lab-leak narratives is the one that suggests the virus already existed in nature, was harvested by scientists and leaked subsequently by accident. This is framed as a reasonable proposition because it requires nothing more sinister than human ineptitude. But the obvious counterpoint is rarely addressed - if the virus already existed in nature, an eventual encounter with humans was virtually inevitable. And of the myriad ways humans interact with the environment, scientific bioprospecting constitutes a tiny proportion, rendering it an unlikely initial vector.
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But more than this, the accidental lab-leak theory commits the dual sin of being unsupported by evidence and unnecessary. Since humankind took our first tentative steps on this planet, devastating plagues have periodically ravaged us, from the Justinian Plague to Black Death to the 1918 influenza outbreak, all without a whit of laboratory-based meddling. Lab-leak narratives are inconsistent with Occam’s razor, a dictum that suggests that when there are multiple competing explanations for an observed event, the candidate with the fewest additional assumptions is generally preferable. So if your car does not start one morning after you’ve previously had battery troubles, the flat battery hypothesis is stronger than speculating that your neighbour sabotaged your engine in the middle of the night. In the case of lab leak, the emergence of a global epidemic could have possibly stemmed from unethical scientific experiments. Yet of the countless viral epidemics that have blighted humanity for millenniums, none needed a virology laboratory to take hold. This makes it a weak supposition. There’s also the “gain of function” theory which suggests that that scientists were experimenting with a non-infectious, non-lethal progenitor virus for non-nefarious reasons which accidentally infected someone in the lab and spread from there. Again, there’s no evidence to back this up.
A more paranoid variant of the story insists Covid-19 was a manufactured bioweapon. This was a dominant conspiracy theory of the early pandemic. But again it is easily dismissed with a moment’s logical reasoning. For any weapon to be useful, it must be aimable; a missile that usually targeted enemies but occasionally wiped out one’s own bases would be a liability, not an asset. The sheer indiscriminate infectivity of Covid-19 would render it similarly useless as a tool of war. While everyone from China to America has been accused of concocting the virus as a weapon, such assertions ignore the reality these nations were massively negatively impacted. More tellingly, these claims were a direct echo of Operation Infektion, a Soviet-Era disinformation campaign spreading the false claim that HIV/Aids was manufactured in an American lab. We know now that Russia merely dusted off its cold war playbook for the social media era, fostering division with a propaganda victory.
So what of the recent, widely reported CIA assessment of lab-leak as the “most likely” source of the pandemic? This assertion is not based on new evidence, but follows a political appointment by Donald Trump, who has himself played to a base that has embraced both the lab-leak as a conspiracy and sinophobia. The conclusion is also deemed “low confidence”, meaning underlying intelligence is contradictory, deficient, and inconclusive. By contrast, the last five years of scientific data have strengthened the natural origins hypothesis; a massive genomic analysis published in Cell last September concluded the first cases started in Wuhan market animals, while publications like The Lancet Microbe and The Journal of Virology lamented the unevidenced fixation with lab-leak narratives and the very real harms they did to scientists who became objects of derision for ideological partisans.
Media coverage, too, has often been at odds with this mainstream scientific opinion. Vanity Fair has run several articles in favour of the lab-leak theory, while the New York Times published an opinion piece by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci under the headline “We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives”, which was based largely on inferences drawn from subpoenaed records of private exchanges between prominent scientists. The piece asserts that the public was indeed misled, while implicitly acknowledging that there is no evidence for the lab leak. This is not the first time the New York Times gave prominence to claims by non-experts, including repeating claims from a highly criticised book advocating a lab-leak scenario.
Perhaps inadvertently, Tufeksci’s oped alludes to a real problem – a growing threat to scientific freedom by ideologues. Referring to subpoenaed records from prominent scientists, it criticised high-profile figures such as Anthony Fauci and Peter Dazcuk for trying to keep personal correspondence private. But this ignores the volume of hateful invective these men endured and continue to from partisans. (Like Fauci, I am a recipient of the Maddox Prize and can attest that being in the firing line of rabid conspiracy theorists means that one’s entire correspondence can and will be twisted into something sinister.)
While lab-leak narratives are more exciting than mundane explanations, they do little to build on our sum of knowledge. Instead, they function as a conspiratorial lens that puts public understanding of science and scientists at risk. While it is theoretically conceivable that evidence might one day emerge for a lab leak, we cannot afford to forget Carl Sagan’s dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – and that simply is not the case for the lab-leak theory.
David Robert Grimes is a scientist and author of The Irrational Ape: Why we fall for disinformation, conspiracy theory, and propaganda (Simon & Schuster)
