The Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth

[Nevilledog]

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Lindsay Beyerstein
@beyerstein
Great piece by @past_is_future, @stuartjdneil, and @STWorg. Shows how powerful interdisciplinary collaboration can be:

scientificamerican.com
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth
Virus origin stories have always been prone to conspiracy theories. COVID disinformation has threatened research—and lives
12:21 PM · Feb 15, 2022

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-lab-leak-hypothesis-made-it-harder-for-scientists-to-seek-the-truth/

Whenever scientific findings threaten people’s sense of control over their lives, conspiracy theories are never far behind. The emergence of novel viruses is no exception. New pathogens have always been accompanied by conspiracy theories about their origin. These claims are often exploited and amplified—and sometimes even created—by political actors. In the 1980s the Soviet KGB mounted a massive disinformation campaign about AIDS, claiming that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had created HIV as part of a biological weapons research program. This campaign benefited from a “scientific” article written by two East German scientists that ostensibly ruled out a natural, African origin of the virus, an explanation favored by Western scientists that has since been unambiguously established. In African countries, where many scientists and politicians considered the hypothesis of an African origin of AIDS to be racist, the disinformation campaign fell on fertile ground. Ultimately the conspiracy theory was picked up by Western media and became firmly entrenched in the U.S. Similarly, when the Zika virus was spreading in 2016 and 2017, social media was awash in claims that it had been designed as a bioweapon.

From the beginning, the genomic evidence led most virologists who were investigating SARS-CoV-2 to favor a zoonotic origin involving a jump of the virus from bats to humans, possibly with the help of an intermediate host animal. But considering the anxiety-provoking upheavals of the pandemic, it came as no surprise that the virus inspired conspiratorial thinking. Some of these theories—such as the idea that 5G broadband rather than a virus causes COVID or that the pandemic is a hoax—are so absurd that they are easily dismissed. But some theories came with a patina of plausibility. Speculation that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China was facilitated by the physical location of the institute: it is right across the Yangtze River from the Huanan market where many of the earliest cases of COVID were detected. The Chinese government’s denial that markets sold live wild animals also roused suspicion, even though such wares were always suspected and have since been confirmed.

The so-called lab-leak hypothesis gained sufficient rhetorical and political force that President Joe Biden instructed the U.S. intelligence services to investigate it. Although the interagency intelligence report update, declassified in October 2021, dismissed several popular laboratory-origin claims—including that the virus was a bioweapon and that the Chinese government knew about the virus before the pandemic—it was unable to unequivocally resolve the origin question.

Does this mean that proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis uncovered a genuine conspiracy that will be revealed by persistent examination? Or is the lab-leak rhetoric rooted in conspiracy theories fueled by anxiety over China’s increasing prominence on the world stage or in preexisting hostility to biotechnology and fear over biosecurity? And what is it about the conditions of the past two years that made it so difficult to know?

*snip*

[Deuce]

1. Never bought into the idea the Virus was created in a lab...hopefully the truth will be found.

[former9thward]

2. China has consistently refused access to the lab.

And has refused to cooperate with any international investigation. If this was a zoonotic matter they would not be doing what they have done. Watch what people do, not what they say.