The facts and fiction of virus’ origin
Anew international report on the coronavirus’ origins doesn’t dispel every reasonable doubt about the beginnings of the pandemic in China. But rational questions must be distinguished from the reckless scapegoating and conspiracy theorizing that have distracted from our own government’s failures and contributed to a wave of antiAsian bigotry and violence.
A World Health Organizationled team of researchers concluded in the report released Tuesday that the novel coronavirus likely made the transition from bats to humans through an unidentified intermediate species, though researchers were unable to identify the animal or the point of transmission. The team also found that the virus is “extremely unlikely” to have come from a laboratory such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
As a number of scientists, Biden administration officials and the WHO’s own director general noted, however, the Chinese government’s opacity, its role in the study and the team’s inability to answer key questions raise substantial doubts about the findings. The case can’t be considered closed without further study and more convincing cooperation from the regime.
But that lingering uncertainty doesn’t justify the calculated conspiracymongering with which former American officials have sought to deflect blame for their botched response to the pandemic. Take the Trump administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, Robert Redfield, who in a recent CNN interview offered his unfounded “point of view” that the virus “most likely ... was from a laboratory, escaped.”
Redfield’s speculation was of a piece with the former administration’s floating of even more outlandish claims that the virus was created or modified in a lab, which experts and U.S. intelligence officials have broadly dismissed. The idea that the virus was collected and accidentally released by a lab is more plausible but no more proven.
The prevailing theory of a chance spillover from animal populations is in keeping with the periodic emergence of a range of pathogens from bats and other species as humans reach every corner of the wilderness. A lab accident wouldn’t change the need for a competent federal response — or the fact that one failed to materialize for months as the virus ravaged this country. As opposed to openminded investigation, dark speculation about the pandemic’s origins seeks to excuse that failure at the expense of innocent victims of xenophobia.