FOCUS: Daniel Engber | The Lab Leak Will Haunt Us Forever

 

 

28 February 23

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FOCUS: Daniel Engber | The Lab Leak Will Haunt Us Forever
Daniel Engber, The Atlantic
Engber writes: "The lab-leak theory lives! Or better put: It never dies." 

Each new revelation is a reminder of how little is actually known.

The lab-leak theory lives! Or better put: It never dies. In response to new but unspecified intelligence, the U.S. Department of Energy has changed its assessment of COVID-19’s origins: The agency, which was previously undecided on the matter, now rates a laboratory mishap ahead of a natural spillover event as the suspected starting point. That conclusion, first reported over the weekend by The Wall Street Journal, matches up with findings from the FBI, and also a Senate minority report out last fall that called the pandemic, “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

Then again, the new assessment does not match up with findings from elsewhere in the federal government. In mid-2021, when President Joe Biden asked the U.S. intelligence community for a 90-day review of the pandemic’s origins, the response came back divided: Four agencies, plus the National Intelligence Council, guessed that COVID started (as nearly all pandemics do) with a natural exposure to an infected animal; three agencies couldn’t decide on an answer; and one blamed a laboratory accident. DOE’s revision, revealed this week, means that a single undecided vote has flipped into the lab-leak camp. If you’re keeping count—and, really, what else can one do?—the matter still appears to be decided in favor of a zoonotic origin, by an updated score of 5–2. The lab-leak theory remains the outlier position.

Are we done? No, we aren’t done. None of these assessments carries much conviction: Only one, from the FBI, was made with “moderate” confidence; the rest are rated “low,” as in, Hmm, we’re not so sure. This lack of confidence—as compared with the overbearing certainty of the scientists and journalists who rejected the possibility of a lab leak in 2020—will now be fodder for what could be months of congressional hearings, as House Republicans pursue evidence of a possible “cover-up.” But for all the Sturm und Drang that’s sure to come, the fundamental state of knowledge on COVID’s origins remains more or less unchanged from where it was a year ago. The story of a market origin matches up with recent history and an array of well-established facts. But the lab-leak theory also fits in certain ways, and—at least for now—it cannot be ruled out. Putting all of this another way: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

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