Trump and Mike Pompeo’s favorite blame-China theory makes great propaganda—but dubious science
that in all likelihood, the virus did not originate in a lab. American allies, meanwhile, appear to be freaked out by the rumor-mongering. “We can’t repeat the mistakes of the past. The WMDs fiasco was not that long ago,” a former senior Australian security officialThe lab-accident scenario seems the stuff of Hollywood thrillers—and perfect as propaganda, which operates on principles similar to those of thrillers—but there are a few facts that give it a surface plausibility.
To laypeople, the research is esoteric, if not inscrutable. So I asked Andersen to debunk the lab theory for me in the simplest, most straightforward terms. First point: The virus’s ability to bind to human receptors is a feature that is also found in, say, viruses from pangolins.
Second point: “The likelihood that a bat researcher was looking at bats, magically finds SARS-CoV-2 in a bat, and either sprays themselves, or forgot to put on the right personal protective equipment, or grows it in a lab and infects themselves—the likelihood of that is super low compared to the scenario that happens all the time, where people come into contact with these viruses out in the world.
What sort of data might that be? “Some whistleblower in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Somebody who committed suicide and wrote a letter saying, ‘This was my experiment.’ If somebody could produce a vial and show, ‘Here’s the pre-virus, which I found in a freezer in the lab.’ None of that has come forward, because it doesn’t exist.”
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