WHETHER IT WAS NATURE OR A BIO-ERROR THAT SPARKED PANDEMIC, BIDEN WILL FIND ANSWERS HARD TO COME BY
WHAT with Euro 2020 0 and the Tokyo Olympics on the horizon, not to mention the greatest game on turf – rugby league – in full swing, bookmakers are working overtime to attract punters.
Between backing Hull FC for this year’s spoils and pondering what Harry and Meghan might call their soon-to-be newborn, my attention has been drawn to another truly fascinating bet.
Away from the high street and the online bookies, there is a site you’d be forgiven for overlooking, but whose wagers are genuinely for the good of humankind.
Called “Long Bets”, it describes itself as “a public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake”.
Currently, there is an open bet of almost £300 between the British astrophysicist Martin Rees, a longterm purveyor of apocalyptic possibilities, and Harvard University’s Steven Pinker, a star psychologist famous for his optimism.
Made more than four years ago, and time-limited to December 31, 2020, Lord Rees, who founded the Centre for the Study of Existential R
Risk, predicted “a bioterror or bioerror e will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a sixmonth period”.
Although the deadline has expired, the bet remains open just as support grows for the belief that Covid-19 may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), rather than leaped from bats to its human Patient Zero.
Recent weeks have seen the controversial claim that the virus might have leaked from one of China’s laboratories – once dismissed by most as a fringe conspiracy theory – gain traction.
Now Lord Rees’ wager has taken on greater significance, after Joe Biden’s administration ordered intelligence officials to “redouble” their efforts to investigate the origins of Covid19, including the theory that it came from Wuhan.
The President said that the US intelligence community had “coalesced around two scenarios”, that it came from a lab accident or emerged naturally from human contact with an infected animal.
China has rejected the laboratory theory, describing it as “smear campaigns and blameshifting”, although WIV has been studying coronaviruses in bats for more than a decade.
The laboratory is located a few kilometres from the Huanan wet market, where the first cluster of infections emerged in Wuhan.
Biden’s move marks a massive shift, given the scorn that was heaped on the lab theory when it was advanced by President Donald Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo while in office. The pair’s evasiveness and lack of information as to what they based their belief on, weakened the claims.
Now Biden wants the truth. The reality is the world deserves an answer. Suppose we do find a single laboratory is responsible for one of the greatest human catastrophes in history. If the pandemic blossomed from a reckless blunder, it’s imperative to ensure it never happens again.
Sadly, unlike Lords Rees’ bet, the odds on China providing help are incredibly long.
China has rejected the laboratory theory, describing it as ‘smear campaigns and blame-shifting’