Covid’s origins: Still no ‘smoking gun’
Republicans have already decided that the Covid19 pandemic was caused by a virus that escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, said Hayes Brown in MSNBC.com. So it was with great jubilation that they seized on a new Department of Energy analysis that supports the lab-leak theory. You can expect Republicans to claim the DOE assessment is a game-changer when they launch House subcommittee hearings this week into the origins of Covid. But the DOE’s assessment isn’t “the smoking gun” Republicans wish it to be. Based on new intelligence, the DOE made its judgment with “low confidence,” joining the FBI in concluding that the virus most likely leaked from a Chinese lab. Most scientists and four other U.S. intelligence agencies who’ve studied the outbreak support an alternative theory—that SARS-CoV-2 is a natural bat virus that jumped species in the animals caged at a Wuhan wet market, and then infected humans there. For Republicans, though, the lab-leak theory is far more appealing, because it enables them to blame a conspiracy “for the fear, death, and chaos of 2020.”
Yes, the intelligence community is divided, said National Review in an editorial. But the DOE’s change of tune is comeuppance for liberals who from the outset “decried the lab-leak theory as unscientific and racist.” It seems like a glaring coincidence that Covid emerged not far from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is known to study coronaviruses. The virus’ origin should have been a matter for serious public discussion, said Ted Galen Carpenter in The American Conservative. But reactionary liberals who insisted anything Donald Trump said couldn’t possibly be true “smothered that debate.”
The lab-leak theory remains nothing but “talk,” with zero evidence behind it, said Jonathan M. Katz in his Substack newsletter. Incredibly, the new DOE analysis shifts the possible source of a leak to a different lab in Wuhan rather than the Institute for Virology—“a completely different scenario.” Meanwhile, the evidence for the wet market theory is strong: All the first Covid cases, scientists have found, were clustered like a bull’seye around the wet market, and investigators who swabbed surfaces found the virus there. A jump from animals is how “nearly every other viral epidemic in human history began,” including the Spanish flu, AIDS, Ebola, and SARS in 2003. The simplest, most obvious explanation may be less exciting—but it’s most likely to be true.