https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/why-scientists-believe-the-wuhan-lab-coronavirus-origin-theory-is-highly-unlikely
Over the past couple of weeks, the theory that
SARS-CoV-2 might have accidentally leaked from a lab inside the Wuhan
Institute of Virology has become a heavily touted casus belli in President Trump’s new cold war with China, as administration officials build their case to blame the whole catastrophe on Xi Jinping’s Communist Party. The lab theory was pushed hard by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, even as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared
that in all likelihood, the virus did not originate in a lab. American
allies, meanwhile, appear to be freaked out by the rumor-mongering. “We
can’t repeat the mistakes of the past. The WMDs fiasco was not that long
ago,” a former senior Australian security official told the Sydney Morning Herald.
The lab-accident scenario seems the stuff of Hollywood thrillers—and
perfect as propaganda, which operates on principles similar to those of
thrillers—but there are a few facts that give it a surface plausibility.
The Wuhan lab happens to conduct bat-coronavirus research, and it also
happens to be located not that far from the seafood market where an
early cluster of cases first emerged in late 2019. But, appealing and
useful as it is in certain kinds of narratives, the lab theory leaves
many virology and epidemiology types highly skeptical. To get a sense of
scientists’ reservations, I spoke with Kristian Andersen, a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research. He was the lead author on a March 17 paper, published in the journal Nature Medicine,
that is seen as the definitive research supporting a natural virus
origin. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is
plausible,” Andersen’s team, which compared the available genome
sequence data for known coronavirus strains, concluded.
