Over at Vanity Fair, Katherine Eban has a very well researched article on the lab leak hypothesis for the origin of COVID-19. She interviewed more than 40 people and reviewed hundreds of pages of government internal memos, meeting minutes, emails, and other documents. Whatever the origin of the virus, the article paints a damning picture of the US Government, the Chinese Government, and a large number of the scientists involved.
The major takeaways from my first post on the matter were that
- There are sound reasons to believe that a lab leak is a reasonable hypothesis that needs to be investigated.
- No scientific argument against the lab leak hypothesis was adduced. Instead, those disparaging it settled for calling it ridiculous and a conspiracy theory. In other words, the objections were political not scientific.
Eban’s article provides further evidence for both those conclusions. There’s still no smoking gun to say that yes, the virus came from a lab leak but there’s overwhelming evidence that there was systematic obfuscation and covering up on the part of government officials and researchers.
When you look at those at the forefront of opposition to the lab leak hypothesis, they turn out to be either officials who supported the funding of gain of function research or the scientists doing the gain of function research. The fear on the part of these folks is neatly captured by a quote from Jamie Metzl:
“If the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.”
The virologists and the bureaucrats whose careers were built on funding them were terrified about what would happen if the truth about what was going on got out. This is true whether or not COVID-19 was the inevitable accident that this type of research virtually guaranteed.
To me, the saddest thing about this is not that politicians lied—we expect that—but that scientists lied and did everything they could to short circuit research into what happened. Color me naive but I hold firm to be ideal that science is the search for truth. The heroes of this story are the scientists who risked their careers and public approbation to state the truth as they knew it. The same goes for those in the government who refused to be silenced and kept looking for that truth.
Eban’s article is long and packed with facts and some of the original documents but if you care about this story, it’s well worth your time.
Afterward
Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article that discusses a May 2020 classified report from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that concluded the lab leak hypothesis was plausible and deserved further investigation. More evidence that the government always knew the origin of the virus was far from a settled question.