What many people don't seem to understand is that the practice of science is not about knowing the right answers to everything. It's about what we don't know. There is a great deal that we're very confident about, which we teach in class, but scientists spend their time when they aren't teaching trying to answer questions, to solve mysteries. Unfortunately, it often happens that individuals become absolutely convinced that they have the right answer before a question is really settled. Then they descend into motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.
So, to set the record straight, although the New York Times has apparently gone in 100% on the lab leak hypothesis about Covid-19, having bought some highly motivated reasoning from a single individual, in fact it remains a pretty strong majority opinion among experts that the virus had a natural origin. So here's that case, in which Ethan Siegel systematically rebuts Alina Chan's NYT article. It's worth reading because it gives a lot of background as well as zeroing in on the specific issue. I'll just give you the killer point. Chan claims that "
- The hypothesis of a natural spillover origin for COVID-19, from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, is not supported by the evidence.
- And that the key evidence that would be expected to have emerged from a natural spillover event, the progenitor animal host of SARS-CoV-2, has never been found.
(These are points 4 and 5 in the original, I've skipped ahead.) None of this is true.
The wet market origin hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 is overwhelmingly supported by the evidence. Some of that evidence includes:
- a 2023 critical analysis of the evidence for the origin of SARS-CoV-2,
- a separate 2023 study on the origins of SARS-CoV-2,
- a 2023 study noting a paucity of evidence for a lab origin and raising concerns about the way lab leak proponents have misinformed the public about the nature of gain-of-function research,
- a 2021 study critically reviewing the (strong) evidence for a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2,
- a 2022 study that identifies the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan (not the WIV) as the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic,
- and a 2024 (free) article in the Annual Review of Virology that concludes “The available data clearly point to a natural zoonotic emergence within, or closely linked to, the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan,” while further noting that no evidence links SARS-CoV-2 to laboratory work at WIV.
And the fifth point is very misleading: most pandemics never have the “progenitor animal host” that caused the spillover identified, so the fact that this hasn’t occurred for SARS-CoV-2 is expected, not evidence that it didn’t have a natural origin.
Now, as I've said and will keep saying, I don't consider the matter settled. However, I also don't attach very much importance to it, or at least not the same importance others seem to find here. If there was a lab leak, it was unintentional, and any potentially dangerous research that may have been behind it was not funded by the United States and nobody in the U.S. knew about it. There is no conspiracy and no coverup, and Anthony Fauci in particular had nothing to do with it. Anyway, it probably didn't happen.
Next, I'll talk about clinical trials and the problems with establishing the safety and efficacy of treatments.
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