Shortly after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, rumors started to circulate that the virus that triggered it came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Different versions of this story, often jumbled together in popular discourse, were quickly rejected by expert institutions and mainstream media outlets as empirically baseless and even racist conspiracy theories—a verdict propagated through social media by fact checkers who deemed these claims to be “disinformation” or “misinformation.”
The scientific community’s “overwhelming” conclusion, declared a now infamous letter in The Lancet in March 2020, was that “this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” and jumped from animals to humans. Yet as the pandemic worsened, it became clear that the alleged scientific consensus around the natural origins of Covid-19 was tenuous at best and disingenuous at worst. By the spring of 2021, the so-called “lab leak” hypothesis had gone sufficiently mainstream that it was the subject of widespread media coverage and even an official White House investigation. Rather than resolving the issue, that investigation further highlighted the divisions within the expert and intelligence communities.
Read the full essay in The New Atlantis .