Public health officials have seriously damaged their credibility with COVID-19 messaging. Many of the things they’ve told us have turned out not to be true. Some, such as their early advice on mask wearing, was a transparent lie that didn’t make sense even on its own terms. If you lie to me once, why should I believe anything else you tell me?
Now that we have a vaccine and the end of the epidemic seems in sight, it seems like a good time to ask where the virus came from. The received wisdom is that it came from bats via the Wuhan wet market. According to this theory, the virus made the jump from bats to an intermediate species, and then to humans. That’s how the SARS1 and MERS viruses did it. This theory is the one championed by the virologist community and some other public officials. And who should know better? Unfortunately, there are several problems with this theory.
The other major contending theory is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was doing gain of function experiments on coronaviruses. That theory was immediately and emphatically disparaged by the virology community, most public heath authorities, and the press even though such leaks are frighteningly common. No evidence was adduced to justify this dismissal. Instead, they authorities simply said it was ridiculous and a conspiracy theory.
If you have a scientific or even a skeptical bent, these denials should be raising a red flag. They don’t sound scientific, they sound political. Irreal doesn’t take any position on the matter because, like most of you, I don’t have the domain knowledge to make an informed decision. Fortunately, Nicholas Wade has a careful and exhaustive article that considers the evidence. The TL;DR is that there’s no definitive evidence either way but that what there is argues heavily for a leak from Wuhan labs.
Wade’s articles seems to me an honest recitation of the facts. It doesn’t reach a firm conclusion but provides sufficient evidence for you to draw your own.