“This virus did not originate in the Wuhan animal market,” he told the network. The confusion was made plain when Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a hard-core China hawk, aired a proto-lab-leak theory in a Februinterview with Fox News. Yet all these categories blurred together in the early days of the pandemic. The term may refer to the release of a manufactured bioweapon, or to an accident involving basic-science research it could involve a germ with genes deliberately inserted, or one that was rapidly evolved inside a cage or in a dish, or even a virus from the wild, brought into a lab and released by accident (in unaltered form) in a city like Wuhan. In that way, the hearing-and the story that it tells about the “Proximal Origin” paper-gestures not toward the true origin of COVID, but toward the origin of the origins debate.įrom the start, the problem has been that a “lab leak” could mean many things. For all of its distractions, though, the House investigation still serves a useful purpose: It sheds light on how discussions of the lab-leak theory went so very, very wrong, and turned into an endless, stultifying spectacle. Read: If the lab-leak theory is right, what’s next?īarbed accusations of this kind have only added headaches to the question of how the pandemic really started. (Fauci has denied that he tried to disprove the lab-leak theory.) government swaying Andersen and Garry to leave behind their scientific judgment and endorse “pro-China talking points” instead. Yesterday’s hearing was less preoccupied with the small, persistent possibility that the coronavirus really did leak out from a lab than with the notion of a conspiracy-a cover-up-that, according to Republicans, involved Fauci and others in the U.S. The political conversation around this episode is not so easily summarized, however. “What happened?”īased on the available facts, the answer seems clear enough: Andersen, Garry, and the others looked more closely at the data, and decided that their fears about a lab leak had been unwarranted the viral features were simply not as weird as they’d first thought. “All of a sudden, you did a 180,” Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York said yesterday morning. The researchers’ rapid and consequential change of heart, as revealed through emails, witness interviews, and Slack exchanges, is now a wellspring for Republicans’ suspicions. That analysis would be cited repeatedly by scientists and media outlets in the months that followed, in support of the idea that the lab-leak theory had been thoroughly debunked. The scientists wrote up this revised assessment in an influential paper, published in the journal Nature Medicine in March 2020, called “ The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The virus is clearly “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the paper said in fact, the experts now “did not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” and that the pandemic almost certainly started with a “zoonotic event”-which is to say, the spillover of an animal virus into human populations. When he laid out the same concern to Anthony Fauci in late January, that some features of the viral genome looked like they might be engineered, Fauci told him to consider going to the FBI.īut days later, Andersen, Garry, and the other scientists were starting to coalesce around a different point of view: Those features were more likely to have developed via natural evolution. “Accidental escape is in fact highly likely-it’s not some fringe theory,” Andersen wrote in a Slack message to a colleague on February 2, 2020.
Republican lawmakers zeroed in on evidence that the witnesses, Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, and other researchers had initially suspected that the coronavirus spread from a Chinese lab. For more than three hours yesterday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic grilled a pair of virologists about their participation in an alleged “cover-up” of the pandemic’s origins.
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